History of DSE
The idea for annual conferences on the general topic of structural econometrics originated with a conference held in August 2017 at the University College London titled “Implementation of Structural Dynamic Models: Methodology and Applications” that was hosted and funded by an ERC grant to Dennis Kristensen, and co-organized with Aureo de Paula, Fedor Iskhakov, John Rust and Bertel Schjerning. The conference was co-sponsored by the Journal of Econometrics and some of the papers submitted to the conference are published in a special issue of that journal on “Dynamic Structural Models” (2019), with Dennis Kristensen and Michael Keane serving as editors and with Fedor Iskhakov and Bertel Schjerning serving as guest coeditors in charge of the special issue submissions.
Year 2017 was the final year of an influential series of workshops hosted by Felix Kübler and Karl Schmedders at the University of Zurich called ZICE (for Z"urich Initiative for Computational Economics) that also had a heavy concentration of instruction in structural econometrics topics. The first UCL conference and the end of the ZICE workshop series inspired us to create the DSE summer school series to help fill the void while focusing the curriculum on numerical implementation of dynamic programming and structural estimation methods, with a strong emphasis on empirical applications.
The first conference/summer school in the DSE series took place at the University of Copenhagen in May 2018, organized by Bertel Schjerning. The theme of this conference and summer school was “Methodology and applications of structural dynamic models and machine learning” The Econometrics Journal served as a co-sponsor of the conference and we anticipate that a separate special issue of the journal will arise out of submissions to this second DSE conference edited by John Rust, with Fedor Iskhakov and Bertel Schjerning serving as guest coeditors. This first DSE summer school attracted over 120 applicants. Due to space constraints approximately 70 graduate students from Europe and North America were admitted.