Roughly 15,000+ economists are trying to get to Philadelphia today for the annual ASSA meetings. In a typical year, I greatly enjoy the meetings. It is a place to see old friends, mentors, past students, co-authors and to attend sessions, meet with book editors and talk about economics. This is a special year for USC Economics this year because we will hire 3 new PHDs to join our faculty. As we upgrade our department, we need "new blood". We will be interviewing 50 people.
The challenge we face is that the ASSA meetings take place in the first week of January and they typically rotate between Boston, Chicago, Philly (and warmer cities including Atlanta, Washington Dc and San Diego). The cold winter cities offer cheap hotels and decent airports but as the winters grow harsher there is rising discontent with bringing thousands of us into "harm's way".
UCLA has moved all of its interviews over to Skype. (UPDATE, I'm wrong about this -- some of the UCLA interviewers will be listening in on Skype). I think this is brilliant. What is lost by not having face to face contact for a 25 minute interview? My hunch is nothing. So, the Economists will adapt by either moving the timing of the conference, the city or an unraveling of the conference as more of the participates who are mainly there for interviewing Skype in.
A general equilibrium point. A young reduced form researcher seeking to answer the question; "how is bad weather affecting the economy" Would run a regression by year of the form:
Total Conference revenue_t = constant + b1*bad weather_jt + b2*great city dummy_j + U_Jt
so we expect that b1<0 and="" b2="">0 as great cities such as San Diego and San Fran generate more business.
The b1 would be interpreted by some reduced form researchers as the "cost of climate change" but let's be more specific, the $ not spent in Philly this weekend (because economists have chosen to stay home) will be spent in the economist's origin cities. The reduced form researchers ignore such cross-elasticities. Why? There are too many cross-elasticities and to properly model them would require a structural model. So, while "b1" can be estimated and it is of interest to Philly's local boosters -- it really isn't that interesting of an economic parameter. The $ that would have been spent in Philly had the weather been good does not vanish when the weather is bad, it is spent elsewhere.