2021 AERE Summer Conference

June 2-4, 2021

Over 680 registered speakers and participants had the opportunity to attend more than 65 parallel paper sessions virtually during the 2021 AERE Summer Conference. This year’s virtual conference also featured two plenary events.

  • In keeping with recent in-person summer conferences, we had a keynote address by Professor Joseph Shapiro, who spoke on “The Costs, Benefits, and Incidence of Environmental Policy in the Twenty-first Century.” Professor Shapiro is a creative and thoughtful researcher and an engaging speaker. Watch Professor Shapiro's keynote address or download his slides>>
  • We also held a virtual social gathering and AERE awards ceremony.  This event provided an opportunity to socialize with your colleagues, honor our award winners and possibly make a new friend.
We worked to enhance engagement throughout the conference by utilizing two-way technology, where both presenters and attendees were able to share their audio and video feeds, and by leaving meeting rooms open post-session to extend discussion. We especially focused on increasing engagement with our graduate students. Prior to the conference, the AERE Board of Directors established a graduate student engagement committee--consisting of board members and three self-nominated graduate students--in part to guide that effort. This committee developed and launched the AERE Lunch Match-up Program, which randomly paired graduate students with later career conference participants for a virtual chat over lunch after the keynote or some other meal during the conference. Lunch (via an Uber Eats voucher) was on AERE for the first 150 participants. Although planned on relatively short notice, this event proved to be one of the most well-received of the entire conference and provides a model for future conferences. 
Thank you to the many people who helped to make all of the conference events possible. This group includes the Summer Conference Organizing Committee: Dan Phaneuf, John Whitehead, Margaret Walls and Neha Khanna. Others reviewed abstracts, contributed to discussions and generally provided support and are too numerous to name but equally deserving of our collective gratitude.

We look forward to seeing everyone next year in Miami! 

View the 2021 Conference Program >>