Public event

ComCap19, presented by the National Coalition for Community Capital (NC3), is a multi-day gathering that offers a unique educational and networking opportunity for all those working toward equitable, resilient, and engaged communities. 

Join the students of PUBPOL 750: Renewable Energy Policy at the State & Local Level for a Student Symposium on State & Local Renewable Energy Policy.  Students will share their research on the web of state and local policies facilitating and hindering renewable energy deployment in California, Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, Oregon, Texas, and Wyoming.

Over the past five years, a growing number of Xinjiang Uighurs have been sent to re-education camps by the Chinese government, most without trials or release dates.  Estimates have reached as high as one million detainees.   The Chinese government has framed these camps as schools that attack terrorist beliefs and give Uighurs the work and life skills necessary to thrive in a modern economy.  It has received very little pressure or public condemnation from its Central Asian neighbors, from Muslim countries, or from its trading partners in the developed world.  This human rights crisis raises questions central to the role and practice of diplomacy.  What justification is there for bringing foreign diplomatic pressure to bear on issues that a country defines as central to its identity and existence?  What do we know about the success of different types of advocacy, whether through diplomatic channels, pressure from international organizations, or NGO-led protest? To what extent does the crisis in Xinjiang affect the stability of Central Asia, or the fate of separatist movements in Tibet, Hong Kong, and Taiwan?

Join the Program for Practical Policy Engagement,  Communications & Outreach, Public Engagement & Impact, and Michigan News for a Getting Stuff Done: Communications Skills Series.

Many statutes now permit bounties for whistleblowers who provide enforcement relevant information to the authorities.  The growth in such bounties has been quite rapid in recent years generating substantial scholarly, policy and practical interest.  However, much of the scholarship does not address a critical feature of corporate liability in the US – there is considerable uncertainty about both the scope and definition of wrongdoing. This talk examines the effects of this uncertainty on the desirable structure and incidence of bounty regimes.  Some key findings are that the greater this uncertainty the harder it will be to gather information about wrongdoing both within a firm and more generally because individuals will likely be reluctant to share information that might be relevant to enforcement. This has numerous effects. First, as gathering and sharing of information becomes more difficult it will become harder to deter and prevent wrongdoing, which in part depends on gathering and sharing information.  Second, weaker gathering and sharing of information within the firm will hamper the ability of employees to work together cohesively. This not only worsens firm performance (which has its own costs), but also is likely to increase wrongdoing because poor firm performance is a key predicator of corporate wrongdoing. The analysis thus counsels caution in extending whistleblower bounties to areas where the underlying law is uncertain, provides insights on how one might design a bounty system in light of this uncertainty (e.g., differentiating between internal and external whistleblowers, varying bounties by firm size), and lays out certain steps that might be taken to ameliorate some of the identified effects of uncertainty.

The Office of Research and the Ford School's Program in Practical Policy Engagement would like to invite you to a presentation on, "The Federal Budget and Policy Process: an NSF perspective."

Rich Cordray, founding director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and Rohit Chopra, Commissioner on the Federal Trade Commission will keynote.

Join the Program for Practical Policy Engagement,  Communications & Outreach, Public Engagement & Impact, and Michigan News for a Getting Stuff Done: Communications Skills Series.

Does Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) expansion have a positive or negative effect on labor market outcomes and household well being in Washington DC?  Hear Dr. Hardy discuss research on how EITC expansions undertaken by the Washington DC affect income and inequality in the city. 

A revival of the U.S.-Japan Automotive Conference held annually between 1981 and 1989, USJAC 2.0 will gather industry leaders, policymakers, and scholars from both sides of the Pacific to discuss the past, present, and future of the U.S. and Japanese auto industries, paying particular attention to the issues of trade, management, and technological change. Keynote speaker and panelist announcements forthcoming.

Local government fiscal health is typically assessed using objective financial indicators, but little is understood about how local officials subjectively understand their own fiscal health. We compare self-assessment data from the Michigan Public Policy Survey with financial data on Michigan local governments to explore the extent to which self-assessments align with conventional financial indicators. Qualitative results reveal that local officials emphasize long-term spending pressures (e.g. roads, infrastructure) and external factors, such as uncertainty around property values and state aid (i.e. revenue sharing) payments, when assessing their fiscal health. Quantitative results provide some corroborating evidence, but in general, conventional indicators are not powerful predictors of self-assessments, especially for high-stress governments. We believe that part of the disparity is that financial indicators do a poor job of capturing what local officials say they are most worried about. We suggest that self-assessments may be a useful supplement to conventional measures in capturing “true” fiscal health.

The Data Privacy and Portability in Financial Technology Symposium celebrates the Michigan Technology Law Review’s 25th Anniversary by hosting an event dedicated to cutting-edge scholarship at the intersection of technology and the law. Specifically, this symposium is designed to examine the inherent tensions between securing privacy rights and the ease at which transactions occur, facilitated by new innovative technologies.

Join the Program for Practical Policy Engagement,  Communications & Outreach, Public Engagement & Impact, and Michigan News for a Getting Stuff Done: Communications Skills Series.

Donia Human Rights Center Panel. Human Rights in North Korea: Crimes Against Humanity, Advocacy for Change, and Future ProspectsKang Cheol Hwan, Jared Genser, Dr. Katrina Lantos Swett, and Kiyoteru Tsutsui

*Stream* Kalil will discuss some of the S&T policy priorities of President Obama as well as “lessons learned” from his service at the White House, and address future challenges for U.S. S&T policy.

Governments have increasingly relied on exchange rate stabilization policies, specifically intervention operations in currency markets and capital controls, to offset external shocks.  The focus on exchange rate stabilization is not limited to countries with pegged exchange rate regimes.  Indeed, a number of countries that currently actively intervene in currency markets self-describe as floaters. The U.S. has responded by raising concerns that these policies amount to currency manipulation. Article IV of the IMF Articles of Agreement requires that members “avoid manipulating exchange rates” in order to gain an unfair competitive advantage over other members. Separately (since 1989) the U.S. Treasury must report to Congress biannually regarding whether individual trading partners are manipulating currencies for unfair advantage.  This talk will examine both the theoretical underpinning and empirical evidence on currency intervention and manipulation, with the goal of better understanding when exchange rate stabilization is effective from the point of view of domestic policy-makers and when it should be considered manipulative from a global perspective.

Join us for a conversation and book talk with Harold Koh on his new book: The Trump Administration and International Law.

Drawing on examples from city government in the UK and US, Carrie will share what a Chief Digital Officer does all day, and a glimpse of the future of city government.

The Program for Practical Policy Engagement (P3E) in partnership with the Students of Color in Public Policy (SCPP) will hold a professional development workshop featuring guest speaker James Feagin, founder & CEO of projects+PEOPLE.