On January 3, 2020, the Institute for Economic and Social Research (IESR) held a reception at the ASSA Annual Meeting. IESR Dean Shuaizhang Feng, GLO President Klaus F. Zimmermann (Uni-Bonn), Nobel Laureate James Heckman (UChicago) as well as a number of fellows of our Institute, Global Labor Organization and the Journal of Population Economics were present at the event.

At the reception, Shuaizhang Feng briefly introduced IESR which recently celebrated its 4th anniversary. Over these years, IESR has grown significantly – it currently has 42 full-time faculty members, many of whom are graduates of renowned institutions such as Yale University, University of Chicago, LSE, UC Berkeley, and UCLA. The Institute runs a Survey Data Center for data collection and management, as well as a Policy Research Center for policy analysis and evaluation (to learn more, you can check out our latest brochure).

The event also featured the prominent Kuznets Prize ceremony of the Journal of Population Economics where Klaus F. Zimmermann, the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of the Journal, announced this year’s winners – Gautam Hazarika, Chandan Kumar Jha and Sudipta Sarangi for their article “Ancestral Ecological Endowments and Missing Women (find out more about the Kuznets Prize 2020 here). James Heckman, who is an Associate Editor of the Journal, presented the award certificates to the authors.

IESR Reception and Kuznets Prize ceremony of the Journal of Population Economics at ASSA Annual Meeting 2020

IESR Dean Shuaizhang Feng is also an Editor of the Journal of Population Economics, as well as a Fellow of the Global Labor Organization. Our Institute has been closely collaborating with Klaus F. Zimmermann since it joined GLO in 2017 – we have been annually organizing joint labor workshop, with many other events planned for the future. Professor Zimmermann has been a strong supporter of our Institute since the very beginning. 

As a Honorary Professor and the Chair of its Advisory Board, James Heckman has played an essential role in IESR's development. Since 2016, he has been involved in numerous collaborative activities with our Institute, including various workshops, wide-scale survey projects, and others. In 2018, the two sides formally launched the Chicago-Jinan Joint Initiative, which serves as a research home for the students and faculty of IESR and The Center for the Economics of Human Development (CEHD), that Heckman directs, as well as for visiting scholars from a broad array of guest institutions. In the comment that followed Kuznets Prize ceremony, James Heckman remarked his long-lasting cooperation with our Institute and those many interesting and important studies he has been jointly carrying out with IESR scholars for the past few years. 

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IESR has been hosting the reception at ASSA Annual Meeting since 2016 to further enhance its global standing and expand its network. ASSA Annual Meeting also continues to serve as the hiring platform for IESR faculty.