Irish Postgraduate and Early Career Conference 2018

From 2001 to 2013, we held eleven workshops in Ireland for postgraduate and early career researchers. They started as exclusively aimed at Irish-based researchers and eventually morphed into international events. The events were run mostly by PhD students in the Universities, including events hosted by UCD, TCD, Limerick, Cork, and Galway. In Scotland, 8 universities combine on PhD training and host an annual event for PhD students. Such events provide students and researchers an opportunity to discuss their work outside their own institution and meet other researchers and faculty.

To restart this effort, we will host a full-day event in Dublin on January 19th. The event is aimed at PhD students and early career researchers across the Irish universities. A full call for papers with details of submissions will be released soon. The event will take the form of thematic sessions with ideally at least some faculty discussant input at each session, along with keynote talks, and engagement with policy and industry. We welcome submissions from PhD students and early career researchers in institutions on the island of Ireland.

I would welcome suggestions from students, researchers, and faculty about how to make this a feature of the Irish research environment. Some questions include whether it should be a student-run event in future years, links to the Irish Economics Association, venues, format of sessions, whether it should be restricted to national institutions, whether there should be job-market aspects etc., I hope revamping these sessions will also create an opportunity to discuss collaboration on advanced training in Economics across the country.