For the fourth consecutive year, Dartmouth students attended the Carroll Round, an annual conference on international economics hosted by Georgetown University, this past weekend. Participants represented 13 universities and colleges and were selected from an international pool of applicants. With five students selected, Dartmouth had the second largest delegation at the conference.
The Dartmouth students - Ashley Halpin '07, Matthew Pech '07, Nedko Kyuchukov '07, DJ Wolff '07 and Jennifer Xi '07 - presented papers they had written for an advanced seminar in international economics taught by professor Nancy Marion.
"[At the conference] students get a sense of what it is really like to be an economist - doing your research and then presenting it," Marion said.
Marion originally nominated seven students to present papers at the conference. Five of them were invited to join more than forty students in showcasing their work at Georgetown.
"In past years when students have gone they have found that the Dartmouth papers are very good and competitive," Marion said.
Wolff, who presented a paper on the economic determinants of international terrorism, agreed with Marion's assessment.
"Most of the other papers were honors level theses, and ours were final papers for our culminating experience," he said. "We spent less time on it and were somewhat concerned about whether we deserved to be there, but in the end we realized that it was fine."
Students at the conference spoke about their research in panels and then responded to questions raised by an assigned student from another college.
"The presentation environment was very collegial," Xi said. "I expected it to be a lot more critical and intense."
Xi spoke about her work on identifying the effects of fiscal and political decentralization on corruption, where she "found that political decentralization increased corruption and fiscal decentralization decreased corruption."
Participants also had the opportunity to meet with Randall Kroszner, a member of the Federal Reserve Board, and hear addresses from Francois Bourguignon, the chief economist at the World Bank, and Grant Aldonas, a career economist who has served in the U.S. government.
"[Kroszner] was very down to earth and seemed very young and what surprised me was how much emphasis he put on anecdotal evidence - evidence he saw on the ground - versus just looking at the hard data," Pech said.
Both Xi and Pech credited the success of the conference with their opportunity to learn about how students across the country and the world approach economics, whether it be empirically, theoretically or otherwise.
The Carroll Round and its benefactors funded the trip to the conference. Registration costs for Dartmouth students were underwritten by the John Sloan Dickey Center for International Understanding.
