Spring 2013 Marsh & McLennan/NERA Economic Consulting Lecture Series on Current Economic Events: Predicting the Present with Search Engine Data
Washington, DC
8 May 2013
Hosted By: NERA Economic Consulting and Marsh & McLennan Companies
NERA Economic Consulting and its parent company, Marsh & McLennan Companies, are co-sponsoring a series of lectures on current economic events organized by The George Washington University's Department of Economics. The sponsorship of the lecture series showcases Marsh & McLennan Companies and NERA's commitment to highlighting the importance and impact of economics in business and regulatory environments.
This event, "Predicting the Present with Search Engine Data," took place 8 May 2013 in Washington, DC, and featured a lecture by Dr. Hal Varian, the Chief Economist at Google and Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, where he was the founding dean of the School of Information. Predicting the present or "nowcasting" is a topic of particular interest to central banks and government agencies. Dr. Varian's presentation showed how search engine data can be used to forecast the near-term values of important economic indicators such as retail, automotive, and housing sales; unemployment claims; travel destination planning; and consumer confidence.
Dr. Varian joined Google in 2002, and has worked on the design of advertising auctions, econometrics, finance, corporate strategy, and public policy. He has written two bestselling textbooks: Intermediate Microeconomics, an undergraduate microeconomics text, and Microeconomic Analysis, an advanced text. He received his BS from MIT in economics and both his MA (mathematics) and PhD (economics) from the University of California, Berkeley.
To learn more about the series, please contact Stuart Harshbarger at stuart.harshbarger@nera.com.
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