Submitted Abstract
The Lunch Seminar in Economics and Management has been launched in 2005, two years after the inception of the University of Luxembourg. Its aim is to (i) provide a forum for exchange of ideas between scholars and with economic actors outside academia; (ii) keep scholars informed about the frontier of research in various areas of economics and management, in a broad sense; (iii) reinforce the link between researchers from UL and other (research) institutions in Luxembourg, and foreign academics; and (iv) place research in economics and management at UL on the international map, by giving the opportunity to foreign scholars to get to know the department of economics and management. Topics tackled in this Seminar Series are broad, and address the latest development in specific areas of economics.In order to achieve this aim, renowned scholars all over Europe and overseas have been invited to the Seminar, and we perpetuate our goal to try to increase every year the quality and the diversity of our guests.So far, the Center for Research in Economics and Management (CREA) has welcomed over 150 speakers, several of whom came from Ivy League universities in the US. For the coming academic year (2014/15), we will have the pleasure to welcome Prof. Alberto Alesina from Harvard University in May 2015 (after the venue of Prof. Philippe Aghion, also from Harvard University who visited UL this academic year, and attracted a large number of participants to the seminar; and Prof. Oded Galor from Brown University during last academic year). Prof. Alesina is amongst the most renowned scholars in political economics, and is certainly one of the very serious candidates for the Nobel prize in the coming years (besides professors Aghion and Galor in growth theory). He has served as Chairman of the Department of Economics at Harvard from 2003 to 2006 and has recently published a book entitled The Future of Europe: Reform or Decline (MIT Press).Note finally, that in order to meet in particular points (iii) and (iv) mentioned above, we always ask our guests to stay for at least 1-2 days in our department. This gives us the opportunity to reinforce ties, but also for any interested person, to meet the speaker in an guest-office space. This experience has been very fruitful, and has benefited many scholars in CREA, including PhD and post doc stuidents, as well as persons outside UL.The programme of the 2014/2015 Lunch Seminar in Economics and Management will welcome 19 speakers. A list of these speakers, as well as their affiliation can be found in the application form of this document. NB: the seminar series stretches over the whole academic year, i.e. from Sept. 24, 2014 to June 25, 2015. In our application for financial support from FNR, we have presented all the events of the series (i.e. 19 overall). However, as you can see from the budgetary part, we ask financial support from Nov. 1 on to comply with FNR guidelines, stating that the funding of the activity can only start at the earliest 4 months after submission of the application. This covers 16 of the 19 lectures.