Models are essential inputs to economic analysis. Yet, an economic model is at best only an approximation to a complex social reality. Economists have approached the issue of model misspecification from two perspectives. A first approach considers how agents within an economic model deal with the possibility that their model of the world may be wrong. A second approach studies how existing econometric techniques for the analysis and interpretation of data must be modified when the model is misspecified. In both settings, robust decision making requires the economic agent or the econometrician to explicitly allow for the risk of misspecification. The aim of the conference, “Robustness in Economics and Econometrics,” is to bring together researchers engaged in these two modeling approaches.

This conference is co-sponsored by BFI’s Macro Finance Research Program and Big Data Initiative.