On April 23-29, 2012, the 15th IZA Summer School took place. This year, 37 students of 15 different nationalities attended the Summer School and were lectured by Andrew J. Oswald (IZA and University of Warwick) and Rainer Winkelmann (University of Zurich and IZA). Oswald’s lectures were on “The Economics of Happiness and Health”, where he discussed among other things the basics of the happiness literature and how happiness relates to more objective measures of health. A more applied econometrics view to this topic was given by Winkelmann in his lectures “Econometric Advances in Discrete Data Modeling, with Applications to Health and Well-being,” providing the students with a practical toolkit for doing applied research in the area of health and well-being. During the afternoon sessions the students themselves presented their work, either in a contributed or in a poster session.
This year's Summer School also welcomed Advisory board member Uwe Sunde (University of Munich and IZA). Four major scientific organizations support the IZA Summer School through an Advisory Committee: the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR), the European Economic Association (EEA), the European Association of Labour Economists (EALE), and the European Society for Population Economics (ESPE). Every year, at least one representative of these organizations has attended the event to meet and interact with the students. This year, Uwe Sunde represented EALE.
In light of the festive character of this 15th anniversary, IZA Director Klaus F. Zimmermann attended the event and gave a presentation about 15 years of IZA Summer School. He stressed that this event has always been one of the most important parts of IZA’s mission to create intensive interactions between junior researchers and well-established labor economists.
View the PDF version to read what alumni say about the IZA Summer School.
