Started off this fiscal year by attending the Allied Social Science Associations’ (ASSA) annual meeting. This conference gathers around 70 associations and has poster sessions, over 1800 presentations, and events all concentrated in a period of three days. Coming back home from this conference, I was still overwhelmed with the sheer scale of it. So, I started exploring some data from the conference program as posted on their website (https://www.aeaweb.org/conference/2024/program)
First, the biggest association represented in ASSA, as measured by count of sessions hosted by this association is the American Economic Association (AEA). The (not so close) second largest association is AFA. The figure below shows the top 20 assocations.
Each session has on average around 4 presentations.
These papers had on average 2.5 authors per paper. A substantial difference between the number of papers with 1–3 authors, and 4 authors (almost half as many).
Some researchers were a part of the author team for several papers or presentations—and they are:
Researchers whose names are listed as authors to papers presented at the conference—where are they affiliated?
The top 30 institutes represented at the conference come as no surprise. Chicago, Stanford, Columbia, the Fed, MIT and UC Berkeley are on top. (I had to count the top 6, not top 3 or top 5, to include Berkeley…)
So, which topics were discussed at the ASSA 2024? Based on JEL classifications for sessions, there was a lot of finance, followed by econometrics, and then specific topics (such as health, environmental, and demographic). The top 30 JEL codes are:
The ASSA was a great opportunity to explore different topics and meet new people. My personal preferences are for smaller conferences, because you actually get the chance to attend almost everything and to greet almost everybody. Here, of course, that is impossible.
Uploaded 2024–01–18; Last updated 2024–01–18