CRCS Lunch Seminar

Date: Monday, April 4, 2011
Time: 11:30am – 1:-00pm
Place: Maxwell Dworkin 119

Speaker: Daron Acemoglu, MIT, Department of Economics

Title: Cascades in Networks and Aggregate Volatility

Abstract: This paper studies cascade effects created by interconnections between sectors, firms or financial institutions. Focusing on a multi-sector economy linked through a supply network, it shows how structural properties of the supply network determine aggregate volatility and the possibility of cascades in which low productivity or the failure of a set of suppliers propagates through the rest of the economy as their downstream sectors/firms also suffer and transmit further downstream.

http://econ-www.mit.edu/files/6147

Bio: K. Daron Acemoglu is Elizabeth and James Killian Professor of Economics in the Department of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a member of the Economic Growth program of the Canadian Institute of Advanced Research. He is also affiliated with the National Bureau Economic Research, the Center for Economic Performance, the Center for Economic Policy Research, and Microsoft Research Center.

He is an elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Econometric Society, the European Economic Association, and the Society of Labor Economists.

Daron Acemoglu has received a BA in economics at the University of York, 1989, M.Sc. in mathematical economics and econometrics at the London School of Economics, 1990, and Ph.D. in economics at the London School of Economics in 1992. Since 1993, he has held the academic positions of Lecturer at the London School of Economics, and Assistant Professor, Pentti Kouri Associate Professor and Professor of Economics at MIT.