Department Partners with Portland State Faculty to Bring Labor Conference to Savery Hall

In an effort to promote greater collaboration and develop support and feedback networks among researchers in labor economics, faculty from UW Economics and Portland State University (PSU) held a conference to share and support labor economics research in the Pacific Northwest.

All labor economists, or economists who use the methodology of labor economics, were invited to participate in "Pacific Northwest Labor Day". The free day-long conference was held on Friday, September 23rd in Savery Hall on the campus of UW Seattle. Interested people were invited to come for some or all of the conference. 

Scholars from UW, the University of British Columbia, PSU, Oregon State University, and Seattle Univerity presented their research on topics such as labor markets, time allocation, health care reform, housing prices, and race and legal services. The full program is here. 

The conference was organized jointly by UW's Melissa Knox and PSU's Jamein Cunningham. Knox, a lecturer in the department, earned her PhD in economics from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2008, and joined the faculty at UW in 2011. Her areas of research interest include health, demography, and international economic development, with a focus on Mexico and China. Knox teaches microeconomic theory and its applications.

Jamein Cunningham, assistant professor of economics at Portland State, is currently the instructor for applied econometrics, labor economics, and  Race & Ethnicity in the Economy. His teaching interests include labor economics, economics of crime, demography, and  microeconometrics. He completed his PhD in economics in 2014 at the University of Michigan.