Public sector wages, unemployment and inequality will be just some of the issues addressed this week at an international conference featuring the world’s most eminent economists including Nobel Laureates, Dale Mortensen and Christopher Pissarides.

The event, hosted by the University of Bristol’s Department of Economics, will feature 30 talks by economists from Europe, the US and Japan, who will be exploring some of the most challenging areas of research affecting the labour economy such as immigration, inequality, unemployment, minimum wage, temporary contracts and health insurance.

Christopher Pissarides and Dale Mortensen, who in 2010 jointly won with Peter Diamond the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, will be delivering keynote lectures on their pioneering work into unemployment and the labour market.

The inaugural event [4 to 5 July], entitled ‘The European Search and Matching (SaM) network’, is sponsored by the Centre for Structural Econometrics in the University’s Department of Economics.

SaM is a European network of academic economists working on search and matching models, including models of labour market search, consumer search, money search and housing search.

Fabien Postel-Vinay, Professor of Economics at the University, said: “The event’s overarching objective is to support the pursuit of high-quality theoretical and applied research in the field of labour economics by facilitating collaborations between researchers and research centres, and provide graduate students and early-career researchers with the opportunity to meet senior peers within the network.  More generally, the event aims to advocate the ‘Search and Matching’ paradigm as a useful way to think about equilibrium in certain markets.”

Further information about the event is available on the conference website.