Faculty and graduate students from St. Louis-area universities with an interest in topics relating to labor, households, health care, law and social welfare are being invited to take part in a series of Monday brown-bag luncheon seminars to be held biweekly through May 1 at WUSTL.
Now in its 10th year, the “Work, Families and Public Policy” series features one-hour presentations on research interests of faculty from local and national universities.
Presentations will be from noon-1 p.m. in Eliot Hall, Room 300, and will be followed by a half-hour discussion period.
The series’ presentations, listed below, are designed to promote interdisciplinary research.
• Jan. 23: Michael Grossman, Ph.D., Distinguished Professor of Economics at the City University of New York and research associate and program director of health economics research at the National Bureau of Economic Research, will examine “Fast-food Restaurant Advertising on Television and Its Influence on Childhood Obesity.”
• Feb. 6: Kevin Lang, Ph.D., professor of economics at Boston University, will speak about “The Consequences of Teenage Childbearing.”
• Feb. 20: Ping Wang, Ph.D., the Seigle Family Professor in Arts & Sciences and chair of the Department of Economics in Arts & Sciences, will discuss “The Timing of Childbearing Among Heterogeneous Women in Dynamic General Equilibrium.”
• March 6: Esther Duflo, Ph.D., professor of economics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, will present “Saving Incentives for Low- and Middle-Income Families: Evidence From a Field Experiment With H&R Block.”
• March 20: Kathleen McGarry, Ph.D., professor of economics at the University of California, Los Angeles, will examine “Multiple Dimensions of Private Information: Evidence From the Long-Term Care Insurance Market.”
• April 3: Robert A. Pollak, Ph.D., the Hernreich Distinguished Professor of Economics in Arts & Sciences and in the Olin School of Business, will present “Are Families Efficient?”
• April 17: Robert Sitkoff, J.D., associate professor of law at Northwestern University, will focus on the question “Did Reform of Prudent Trust Investment Laws Change Trust Portfolio Allocation?”
• May 1: Gautam Gowrisankaran, Ph.D., assistant professor of economics in the Olin School, will speak about “The Market for Executive Education.”
Pollak has been the lead organizer of the series for the past nine years.
The co-organizer is Michael W. Sherraden, Ph.D., the Benjamin E. Youngdahl Professor of Social Development and director of the Center for Social Development in the George Warren Brown School of Social Work.
The series is sponsored by the Olin School; the School of Social Work and the Center for Social Development; the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies in the School of Law; the Department of Economics; the Center for Health Policy; and the College of Arts & Sciences.
The classroom is courtesy of the Weidenbaum Center on the Economy, Government, and Public Policy in Arts & Sciences.
For more information, go online to www.olin.wustl.edu/links and click on the “Academic Seminars” drop-down menu on the right-hand side.
For more information, contact Pollak (935-4918; pollak@wustl.edu) or Sherraden (935-6691; sherrad@wustl.edu).