More than 111 economists met in Fribourg

This year’s annual congress of the “Swiss Society for Economics and Statistics” was successfully held at the University of Fribourg. 38 experts helped to review the more than 222 submissions; an algorithm helped to allocate the accepted presentations to conference sessions.

The University of Fribourg proudly hosted this year’s annual congress of the SSES. Keynote speeches were delivered by Ruben Durante (Universitat Pompeu Fabra), Andrea Prat (Columbia University), and Pinar Yildirim (Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania). The keynotes and some general sessions addressed the conference’s main theme “Social media and its challenges for economic policy”. The other general sessions were open to any topic relevant to all fields of economics.

The scientific committee was pleased to receive more than 222 submissions of original research articles.  After the peer-review process involving 38 experts, the accepted papers were allocated to conference sessions using a text-based data-mining algorithm. This algorithm – programmed in one afternoon – read all title pages with respect to title, abstract and keywords to compute the similarity between different submissions. With the goal of maximizing similarity within sessions, the algorithm produced a first proposal for how to bundle papers into sessions of three. Human oversight then helped to modify this first proposal into a nice conference program.

The congress was a festival with 111 high-quality presentations. Besides the scientific program, the congress also consisted of social activities and countless conversations in a friendly and collegial atmosphere. The local organizing committee consisted of Mark Schelker (Chair), Berno Büchel, Holger Herz, Martin Huber from the department of economics. Financial support of the Fondation SES and the Fond ISES is thankfully acknowledged.

The congress in some figures:

Impressions:

Source: Source: Berno Büchel, Webzine SES of the University of Fribourg, N° 29, Fall 2022