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» Sept. 20 Seminar: Justin Wolfers

Sept. 20 Seminar: Justin Wolfers

Date: 
Thu, 09/20/2012 - 4:00pm - 5:30pm
Seminar Information: 

Justin Wolfers

Professor of Economics and Public Policy, University of Michigan

"Forecasting Elections: Voter Intentions versus Expectations"
Location: 

4:00-5:30 pm
UM: 3100 North Quad, 105 S. State St.
WSU: 313 State Hall (via videoconference)

Wolfers.jpg
Seminar Description: 

Most pollsters base their election projections off questions of voter intentions, which ask “If the election were held today, who would you vote for?” By contrast, we probe the value of questions probing voters’ expectations, which typically ask: “Regardless of who you plan to vote for, who do you think will win the upcoming election?” We demonstrate that polls of voter expectations yield consistently more accurate forecasts than polls of voter intentions. A small-scale structural model reveals that this is because we are polling from a broader information set, and voters respond as if they had polled ten of their friends. This model also provides a rational interpretation for why respondents’ forecasts are correlated with their expectations. We use our structural model to extract accurate election forecasts from non-random samples. Finally, we discuss the implications for information aggregation more generally.

Seminar Speaker Bio: 

Justin Wolfers is joining the University of Michigan as a Professor of Economics, and also a Professor of Public Policy. He is also a senior fellow of the Brookings Institution, co-editor of the Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, a Research Associate with the National Bureau of Economic Research; a Research Fellow with the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) in Bonn; a Research Affiliate with the Centre for Economic Policy Research in London; an International Research Fellow with the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, and a Fellow of the CESifo, in Munich.

He was previously an Associate Professor of Business and Public Policy at the Wharton School, and an Assistant Professor at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, and an economist with the Reserve Bank of Australia. Dr. Wolfers earned his Ph.D. in economics in 2001 from Harvard University, and was a Fulbright, Knox and Menzies Scholar. He earned his undergraduate degree in Economics his native Australia at the University of Sydney in 1994, winning the University Medal.

Wolfers' research focuses on labor economics, macroeconomics, law and economics, social policy and behavioral economics. Beyond research, he is a popular MBA teacher, a sometime blogger, a columnist for Bloomberg View, and a commentator for public radio’s Marketplace program.

Website: http://bpp.wharton.upenn.edu/jwolfers/index.shtml