Past Events | Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy
Showing 1141 - 1170 of 2508 results
CFLP Blue Bag Lunches

Myths about student loans

Jan 17, 2019, 12:00-1:00 pm EST
Jeffries Hall Room 0220
The massive dollar amounts associated with student loan debt and the impact on individuals and the financial stability of the overall economy has attracted the attention of journalists, economists, and average Americans. There are, however, several myths associated with these eye-popping numbers, and Susan Dynarski, Professor of public policy, education and economics will discuss a few of these myths in our January Blue Bag Lunch Talk. For example, in a recent paper for Brookings, "The Trouble with Student Loans? Low Earnings, Not High Debt," Professor Dynarski debunks the popular notion that more student debt leads to higher student loan default rates. In fact, research shows that default rates are highest among individuals with smaller loan balances. Students borrowing under $5,000 default at a rate of 34 percent, compared to 18 percent for those borrowing more than $100,000. Among policy proposals advocated by Professor Dynarski to address the student loan crisis is to automatically enroll borrowers who are late on payments in income-based repayment, or adjust loan payments each pay period, similar to the current income-tax withholding system.

Final Applied Policy Seminar student flash presentations and celebration

Dec 12, 2018, 1:00-4:30 pm EST
Weill Hall, Betty Ford Classroom (1110)
Join Ford School students on Wednesday, December 12, 2018 from 1pm-2:30pm for their final Applied Policy Seminar student flash presentations in the Betty Ford Classroom (1110)/Weill Hall.  Reception to follow.RSVP Here.  
Ford School
CFLP Blue Bag Lunches

Effects of team membership on pro-social lending in online microfinance: Large-scale field experiments on Kiva

Dec 6, 2018, 12:00-1:00 pm EST
South Hall 0220
This will be a presentation of two large-scale field experiments designed to test the hypothesis that group membership can increase participation and pro-social lending for an online crowdlending community, Kiva. The first experiment uses variations on a simple email manipulation to encourage Kiva members to join a lending team, testing which types of team recommendation emails are most likely to get members to join teams as well as the subsequent impact on lending. We find that emails do increase the likelihood that a lender joins a team, and that joining a team increases lending in a short window following our intervention. The impact on lending is large relative to median lender lifetime loans. We also find that lenders are more likely to join teams recommended based on location similarity rather than team status. Our results suggest team recommendations can be an effective behavioral mechanism to increase pro-social lending. In a second field experiment, we manipulate forum messages to explore the underlying mechanisms for teams to be effective. 

Alt-Association: The Role of Law in Combating Extremism

Nov 17, 2018, 8:30 am-6:30 pm EST
South Hall
This Symposium is intended to provide an overview of the legal mechanisms and challenges in responding to extremist organizations, as well as an opportunity to work in interdisciplinary teams to address the issues. 
Ford School

The Future of North American Trade

Nov 15-16, 2018, 5:30-8:00 pm EST
Campbell Conference Facility
 The objective of the North American Colloquium is to provide a forum that strengtens a wider North American Conversation and more fruitful trilateral cooperation between Canada, Mexico and the US. Colloquium will allow for distinct internal/regional and indigenous perspectives within each country to be showcased.
Ford School
Economic Development Seminar

Measurement of intergenerational mobility in developing countries, with evidence from India

Nov 15, 2018, 4:00-5:30 am EST
3240 Weill Hall
Estimating intergenerational mobility in developing countries is difficult because matched parent-child income records are rarely available and education is measured very coarsely. In particular, there are no established methods for comparing educational mobility for subsamples of the population when the education distribution is changing over time.
Ford School

Detaining Refugee Children: What’s At Stake?

Nov 14, 2018, 6:45-8:15 pm EST
Weill Hall, Betty Ford Classroom (1110)
This panel of three experts examines the psychological, political, and legal impact of the policy on the families, policy makers, and public opinions, asking the question of what's at stake.
Ford School
CLOSUP Lecture Series

The Role and Impact of Sports in American Society, a conversation with Ned Colletti Jr., Former General Manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers

Nov 14, 2018, 4:00-5:30 pm EST
Weill Hall, Betty Ford Classroom (1110)
Sports remains a fascination to millions of Americans but also presents a great range of challenging public policy issues at both the professional and collegiate levels.  Please join us for a candid conversation about "Sports in America" with former Los Angeles Dodger General Manager Ned Colletti.
Ford School

Ford School and PSID reception at the APPAM conference

Nov 9, 2018, 6:30-8:00 pm EST
Marriott Wardman Park, Washington, DC
The Ford School and the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) will host a reception for alumni and friends in connection with APPAM's annual fall conference in Washington, DC.
Ford School

The Free and Open Indo-Pacific Region Conference

Nov 8, 2018, 5:30-7:30 pm EST
Annenberg Auditorium, 1110 Weill Hall
Indo-Pacific Conference organized by International Policy Center and Center for Japanese Studies features a keynote by Susan Thornton, Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs.
Economic Development Seminar

Gendered Language

Nov 8, 2018, 4:00-5:30 pm EST
3240 Weill Hall
Languages use different systems for classifying nouns. Gender languages assign many — sometimes all — nouns to distinct sex-based categories, masculine and feminine. We construct a new data set, documenting this property for more than four thousand languages which together account for more than 99 percent of the world’s population. 
Ford School

Election Watch Party 2018

Nov 6-7, 2018, 8:00 pm-12:00 am EST
Fraser's Pub
Ford School Election Watch Party on November 6 at Frasier’s Pub.
Ford School
Ford Security Seminar

Tied Aid and Development

Nov 5, 2018, 11:30 am-1:00 pm EST
3240 Weill Hall
Donors have long engaged the private sector by tying foreign aid, forcing recipients to buy from donor countries. But recently, donors have partnered with private money on a larger scale, making tied aid an important area of interest.
Ford School
Critical Race Theory Discussion Series

Big Data, Incivility, and Social Media

Nov 2, 2018, 11:45 am-1:00 pm EDT
Betty Ford Classroom (1110 Weill Hall)
The Critical Race Theory (CRT) Discussion Series is co-sponsored by the Ford School and the University of Michigan Law School. Graduate and professional students are invited to join us for our third session, "Big Data, Incivility, and Social Media." Lunch will be provided.
Economic Development Seminar

A New Engel on the Gains from Trade

Nov 1, 2018, 4:00-5:30 pm EDT
3240 Weill Hall
David Atkin, MIT on A New Engel on the Gains from Trade.  Measuring the gains from trade and their distribution is challenging. Recent empirical contributions have addressed this challenge by drawing on rich and newly available sources of microdata to measure changes in household nominal incomes and price indices. While such data have become available for some components of household welfare, and for some locations and periods, they are typically not available for the entire consumption basket. In this paper, we propose and implement an alternative approach that uses rich, but widely available, expenditure survey microdata to estimate theory-consistent changes in income-group specific price indices and welfare. Our approach builds on existing work that uses linear Engel curves and changes in expenditure on income-elastic goods to infer unobserved real incomes. A major shortcoming of this approach is that while based on non-homothetic preferences, the price indices it recovers are homothetic and hence are neither theory consistent nor suitable for distributional analysis when relative prices are changing. To make progress, we show that we can recover changes in income-specific price indices and welfare from horizontal shifts in Engel curves if preferences are quasi-separable (Gorman, 1970; 1976) and we focus on what we term “relative Engel curves”. Our approach is flexible enough to allow for the highly non-linear Engel curves we document in the data, and for non-parametric estimation at each point of the income distribution. We first implement this approach to estimate changes in cost of living and household welfare using Indian microdata. We then revisit the impacts of India’s trade reforms across regions. 
Ford School
CFLP Blue Bag Lunches

Taxes and public policy: How Ross students and city administrators are working together to help finance revitalization efforts in Detroit

Nov 1, 2018, 12:00-1:00 pm EDT
South Hall 0220
The rebirth of Detroit is dependent on a multitude of factors including issues related to urban infrastructure, the revitalization of neighborhoods, and beyond. Critical to this rebirth is investment in the city. For the city administration, this investment means being able to collect sufficient tax revenues to turn on streetlights, police neighborhoods, replace infrastructure, and finance other projects. Unfortunately, one consequence of the challenges faced by the city has been a culture of non-payment of the taxes owed. Over the last three years, the Master of Accounting students at the Ross School of Business have worked closely with the city to help address these non-payment issues. This talk will describe the projects the students have worked on, the benefits to both the city and to the students, and the work that still needs to be done. We will be joined by the city’s Director of Audit and Compliance, Odell Bailey.
CLOSUP Lecture Series

Working Together to Achieve Detroit’s Future

Oct 31, 2018, 2:30-3:50 pm EDT
Weill Hall, Annenberg Auditorium (1120)
The Ford School’s Michigan Politics and Policy class (PubPol 475/750) will be joined by Chase Cantrell, Executive Director and Founder of Building Community Value for a discussion about the future of Detroit on Weds Oct 31, 2:30pm. We have moved this class session to the larger Ford School Annenberg Auditorium (1120) so this lecture can be open to the public -- we hope to see you there!
Ford School

2020 Census: Citizenship, Science, Politics, and Privacy

Oct 31, 2018, 8:30 am-12:00 pm EDT
ISR 1430
The event will be a half-day symposium at which scholars, public officials, private sector representatives, and other census stakeholders will address preparations for the 2020 Census and the challenges it faces, include funding, the proposed citizenship question, and the implications of an inaccurate count.
Ford School