Second Open Economics International Workshop

## Event Details

* When: 11-12 June, 2013
* Where: MIT Sloan School of Management, U.S.
* Structure: about 35 participants, invite-only

## Purpose and Aims

The aim of the workshop is to build an understanding of the value of open data and open tools for the Economics profession and the obstacles to opening up information, as well as the role of greater openness in broadening understanding of and engagement with Economics among the wider community including policy-makers and society.

The second workshop will build upon the first event in December 2012 and will explore in more detail the tools and processes for making economics research data available, taking examples from science and considering economic data in the context of academic publishing.

### Topics:

• Research data management: how and where to share economics social science research data, enforce data management plans, promote better data management and data use
• Open and collaborative research: how to create incentives for economists and social scientists to share their research data and methods openly with the academic community
• Transparent economics: greater involvement of the public in the research agenda

### Desired outcomes:

• Engage with key stakeholder groups including academics, funding agencies, journal editors, data publishers, research data managers and others
• Identify tools and best practice from the sciences and economics which could be used to make more economic research data available and re-usable
• Recognise communities and use cases of open economic data and showcase potential value of open economic research
• Determine outstanding problems and roadblocks which prevent open sharing of economic information and data
• Reach an agreement on the “Open Economics Principles”

## Programme

## Speakers

### Micah Altman

Dr Micah Altman is Director of Research and Head/Scientist, Program on Information Science for the MIT Libraries, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dr. Altman is also a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at The Brookings Institution. Prior to arriving at MIT, Dr. Altman served at Harvard University for fifteen years as the Associate Director of the Harvard-MIT Data Center, Archival Director of the Henry A. Murray Archive, and Senior Research Scientist in the Institute for Quantitative Social Sciences. Dr. Altman conducts research in social science, information science and research methods — focusing on the intersections of information, technology, privacy, and politics; and on the dissemination, preservation, reliability and governance of scientific knowledge. See more http://micahaltman.com/.

### Nikos Askitas

Nikos Askitas is Head of Data and Technology at the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) in Bonn Germany, a member of the Expert Committee of the DDI alliance and a speaker of the German Research Data Infrastructure to the German Council of Social and Economic Data. He is a mathematician with research in 4-dimensional topology and classical Knot Theory and a programmer who created JoSuA, a web application whose goal is to open sensitive data for research, currently used to run remote scientific computing at the Research Institute of the German Federal Employment Agency. His economics research uses Internet Data and spans forecasting of German labor conditions, conditions in the US housing market, the German business cycle, and the health effects of the current crisis in the G8.
His current research interests include technology and economics, social media and the firm, internet (big) data and application of game theory to evolutionary biology. More about Nikos at http://www.askitas.com/”

### Shaida Badiee

Ms. Shaida Badiee directs the department that produces the World Bank’s statistical products, with her work focused on economic information systems to gather and share data among the Bank’s member countries and partners. She is the champion for the Open Data Initiative and responsible for the data.worldbank.org containing popular statistical publications such as the World Development Indicators, as well as the World Bank Atlas, and the Global Development Finance and providing free of charge and easy access to detailed and comprehensive data on countries’ and regions’ progress in attaining social, economic and environmental conditions. Ms. Badiee also supervises the World Bank’s central statistical capacity building activities to support national and international efforts aimed at improving development data quality and data availability. Before assuming this position, she had held several positions in the Bank related to information systems and statistical areas. Before joining the Bank in 1977, she taught computer science and information management at George Washington University School of Engineering.

### Amparo Ballivian

Amparo Ballivian is a Lead Economist working with the Development Data Group of the World Bank. Her principal responsibility is to lead the Bank’s team that provides support to developing countries’ Open Data initiatives. In her previous positions, she has led various operational engagements in the Latin America and Caribbean and Africa regions of the Bank. Before joining the Bank she worked in academia, the diplomatic service, private sector development and has held senior government positions, including Minister of Housing and Basic Services and Chair of the Board of National Customs in her native Bolivia. Amparo graduated with a master in mathematical economics and a PhD in econometrics from Rice University.

### Thomas Bourke

Thomas Bourke is Economics Librarian at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy. He holds a degree in modern history from University College Dublin and an MA from Dublin City University. His PhD in international political economy at the EUI, focused on EU-Japan economic relations. The European University Institute is an international doctoral and postdoctoral research institute, established by the European Community member states in 1976, specialising in economics, political and social sciences, law and history.

### Philip E. Bourne

Philip E. Bourne is Associate Vice Chancellor for Innovation and Industrial Alliances, a Professor in the Department of Pharmacology and Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences at the University of California San Diego,  Associate Director of the RCSB Protein Data Bank and an Adjunct Professor at the Sanford Burnham Institute. Bourne is committed to furthering the free dissemination of science through new models of publishing and better integration and subsequent dissemination of data and results which as far as possible should be freely available to all. He is the co-founder and founding Editor-in-Chief of the open access journal PLOS Computational Biology.

### Carson Christiano

Carson is the head of CEGA’s partnership development efforts and helps to coordinate the Berkeley Initiative for Transparency in the Social Sciences (BITSS). She also manages a study to evaluate the impacts of rural electrification programs in Kenya and India. Previously, she worked with Innovations for Poverty Action in Kenya on a large-scale evaluation of water, sanitation and hygiene interventions. Carson holds a Masters in Public Policy from UC Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy and a BA in Political Science and International Studies from Northwestern University.

### Mercè Crosas

Mercè Crosas is the Director of Data Science at the Institute for Quantitative Social Science (IQSS) at Harvard University. Her group includes the Dataverse Network project, data acquisition and curation, the Murray Research Archive, statistical programming (Zelig and other R statistical packages), and the Consilience project on text analysis. Her interests in data science are to apply computer science, statistics, mathematics and cross-disciplinary expertise to develop research tools that facilitate the access, reuse and analysis of data. She is currently collaborating with a number of data related projects, including Privacy Tools for sharing research data, PKP’s Open Journal System, DataBridge, and Seamless Astronomy.

### Daniel Feenberg

Daniel Feenberg earned a Ph.D. in economics at Princeton University in 1980 and has worked at the National Bureau of Economics in Cambridge ever since, with only brief interuptions for teaching and serice at the Treasury in Washington. He is currently Research Associate in the Public Economics program and Director of Information Technology at the NBER. Among his activities is maintenance of “Taxsim”, the NBER’s “software as a service” system for calculating US income tax liabilities from micro data. It has been used in hundreds of scholarly papers and several government agencies.

### Joshua Gans

Joshua Gans is the Jeffrey S. Skoll Chair of Technical Innovation and Entrepreneurship at the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto. He holds a PhD in Economics from Stanford and has over 100 publications in economics and strategy. Joshua is the author of Information Wants to be Shared (published by Harvard Business Review Press) and he is also the co-founder of the Digitopoly blog (digitopoly.org). Finally Joshua is Co Director of the Research Program on the Economics of Knowledge Contribution and Distribution (contributioneconomy.net).

### Daniel L. Goroff

Daniel L. Goroff is Vice President and Program Director at the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, a private philanthropy that supports breakthroughs in science, technology, and economics. He is especially interested in financial regulation, behavioral economics, big data, and higher education. Goroff is Professor Emeritus of Mathematics and Economics at Harvey Mudd College, where he served as Vice President for Academic Affairs and Dean of the Faculty. Before that, he was a faculty member at Harvard University for over twenty years. Daniel Goroff has twice worked for the President’s Science Advisor in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, most recently as Assistant Director for Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences.

### Benjamin Mako Hill

Benjamin Mako Hill is a social scientist, technologist, and activist. In all three roles, he works to understand why, and when, peer production succeeds. He is a PhD Candidate in a joint program between the MIT Sloan School of Management and the MIT Media Lab and a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. In September 2013, he will join the faculty of the
Department of Communication at the University of Washington.

### Eric von Hippel

Eric von Hippel is T Wilson Professor of Innovation Management, and also Professor of Engineering Systems at MIT. von Hippel’s academic research examines the sources and economics of open and distributed innovation. He specializes in research related to the nature and economics of distributed and open innovation. His books, “The Sources of Innovation” and “Democratizing Innovation” plus many academic papers are available for free download from his MIT website at http://mit.edu/evhippel/www/books.htm.

### Brian Hole

Brian Hole is the founder of Ubiquity Press, an open access academic publisher based in London. The press aims to significantly lower the cost of open access publishing and to expand it to include the social sciences and humanities. The publication of research data and software on an equal level with articles and books are another important focus area. At the same time he is completing a PhD at University College London, focusing on issues of heritage, nationalism and identity among communities in India.

### Michael McDonald

Dr. Michael P. McDonald is Associate Professor of Government and Politics in the Department of Public and International Affairs at George Mason University and a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution. He specializes in American elections, electoral institutions, and methodology. He is a co-principle investigator on the Public Mapping Project, a project to encourage public participation in redistricting.

### Patrick McNeal

Patrick McNeal joined J-PAL in 2010 and oversees its information technology. Patrick holds a Bachelors of Science degree in Computer Engineering from the University of Michigan. Previously, he worked for both the University of Michigan and MIT’s central technology groups. At J-PAL, Patrick’s responsibilities include consulting with researchers on using technology in the field, overseeing the design, development and deployment of internal systems, and addressing day-to-day technology issues. Recently, he has worked with the American Economics Association to design and implement a registry for randomized trials in economics.

### Pablo de Pedraza

Pablo de Pedraza works at the Applied Economics Department of the University of Salamanca. He is the Chair of Webdatanet (EU Cost Action), a network that brings together web data experts from a variety of disciplines aiming to address methodological issues of web-based data collection and foster its scientific usage by contributing to their theoretical and empirical foundations, stimulating its integration into the entire research process, and enhancing their integrity and legitimacy. Since 2005 he is a member of the Wage Indicator foundation. He conducts research in labor economics, job insecurity, life satisfaction and post adjustment techniques in international labor oriented web surveys.

### Amy Mehraban Pienta

Amy Mehraban Pienta is Acquisitions Director at ICPSR. She is also a research affiliate of the University of Michigan Center on the Demography of Aging and the Population Studies Center at the University of Michigan. At ICPSR, she oversees new data acquisitions. Major responsibilities include identifying new data collections in the social sciences, strategic planning for new data acquisitions, and developing appraisal standards for data. Pienta’s primary research interests are retirement and health in later life. She has studied women’s retirement behavior, the joint retirement behavior of married couples, and the relationship between various social statuses and health.

### Rufus Pollock

Rufus Pollock is a Shuttleworth Foundation Fellow, an Associate of the Centre for Intellectual Property and Information Law at the University of Cambridge and a Director of the Open Knowledge Foundation which he co-founded in 2004. He has worked extensively as a scholar and developer on the social, legal and technological issues related to the creation and sharing of knowledge. More information can be found on his home page.

### Jean Roth

Jean Roth is the Data Specialist at the National Bureau of Economic Research, a private, nonprofit dedicated to promoting a greater understanding of how the economy works. She writes code to manage data and make data easier to use. Roth maintains the NBER’s public use data archive as well as many
large health insurance claims databases. She earned an MS in Statistics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

### John Rust

John Rust is Professor of Economics at Georgetown University. He was previously professor of economics at the University of Maryland from 2001 to 2012, Yale University from 1996 to 2001, and the University of Wisconsin from 1983 to 1995. Rust received his PhD in Economics from MIT in 1983, specializing in applied econometrics. Rust is a Fellow of the Econometric Society, and the co-founder of the firm Technoluddites, Inc. that provides web-based software for the benefit of academia (products include Editorial Express, for online management of submissions to over 100 academic journals, and Conference Maker for online conference organization used by over 300 international conferences, and Head Hunter used by over 100 universities for web-based academic recruiting). He is also co-founder of the non-profit charitable organization, EconJobMarket.org (EJM) designed to facilitate the efficient operation of the job market for economists.

### Joan Starr

Joan Starr is Chair of the Metadata Working Group of DataCite, an international organization working for easier access to and increased acceptance of research data in scholarly communications. Her home base is California Digital Library (CDL), a DataCite founding member organization. There she manages the EZID service, a data management service that makes it easy to create and manage unique, long-term identifiers such as DataCite DOIs as well as other identifier types.

### Mireille van Eechoud

Mireille van Eechoud is professor of Information Law, and directs the IViR’s Information Law master programme. A key research theme in Van Eechoud’s current work is the emergent regulatory framework for open public sector data. Of special interest is the relationship between rights of access as enshrined in freedom of information laws and the (commercial) use of public sector information.

### Gert G. Wagner

Gert G. Wagner is Professor of Economics at the Berlin University of Technology (TUB), member of the Executive Board of DIW Berlin, and Max Planck Fellow at the MPI for Human Development (Berlin). Wagner is chairman of the German Census Commission and German Council for Social and Economic Data, and he serves on the Advisory Board to Statistics Germany and serves on the Study Commission “Growth, Waelth and Well-Being” of the German Parliament (Bundestag). Wagner is editor-in-chief of Schmollers Jahrbuch (Journal of Applied Social Science Studies).

### Jennifer Wang

Jennifer Wang is the Special Projects Associate at the Center for Effective Global Action (CEGA) where she supports the development and operation of the Berkeley Initiative for Transparency in the Social Sciences (BITSS). Previously, she conducted field research on food security, health, and savings in the slums of Nairobi, and managed sustainable economic development initiatives in Chicago. Jen holds an MS in Global Health and Environment from UC Berkeley and a BS in Chemistry from Rice University.

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