UCLA economist to discuss cleansing effects of Great Recession
KALAMAZOO, Mich.—An economist from the University of California at Los Angeles will address the cleansing effects of the Great Recession when he speaks in April at Western Michigan University as part of the 2014-15 Werner Sichel Lecture Series.
Dr. Till von Wachter, associate professor of economics at UCLA, will speak at 3 p.m. Wednesday, April 8, in 2028 Brown Hall. His presentation is free and open to the public and is titled "Cleansing Effects from the Great Recession."
Till von Wachter
Von Wachter received a doctoral degree in economics from the University of California at Berkeley. He has advised the U.S. Department of Labor, the Canadian labor ministry, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development and the United Nations.
Von Wachter has taught at UCLA since 2012. Before joining UCLA, he taught at Columbia University. He is also a faculty research affiliate of the California Center for Population Research, the National Bureau of Economic Research and adjunct research affiliate for the RAND Corp., a nonprofit institution that seeks to improve policy and decision-making through research and analysis.
Research interests include labor economics, economics of aging and macroeconomics. His work has been the subject of several congressional testimonies, and such news outlets as the New York Times and Wall Street Journal have frequently quoted his research.
His writings on job displacement, unemployment insurance and the costs of recessions for young workers have been published in the American Economic Review, Quarterly Journal of Economics, American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, Review of Economics and Statistics, Journal of Economic Literature and many more. He is co-editor of the book "The Analysis of Firms and Employees: Quantitative and Qualitative Approaches."
Von Wachter is a frequent collaborator of the German Social Security Agency and is an associate editor of Industrial Relations: A Journal of Economy and Society.
About the series
The Sichel Series is organized by the WMU Department of Economics and named in honor of Werner Sichel, a longtime WMU economics professor and former department chair, who retired in 2004. The series is annually cosponsored by the College of Arts and Sciences and W. E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research. The lectures are open to the public and formatted with the general public in mind.
This year's series is being organized by Dr. Eskander Alvi, a WMU professor of economics.
For more information, contact Alvi at (269) 387-5547 or eskander.alvi@wmich.edu.
For more news, arts and events, visit wmich.edu/news.