From October 19th to 22nd, REAP's partner at Shaanxi Normal University, the Center for Experimental Economics in Education (CEEE), held a conference gathering representatives from 10 universities across China and more than 20 foundations, NGOs, and government education departments to exchange experiences regarding education development programs and impact evaluation in China.  Founded in January of 2014, CEEE aims to raise the quality and effectiveness of education policy and projects throughout China not only by conducting action research, but also by leading training sessions to help other academic research teams, government officials, and NGO and foundation members understand the importance of evidence-based action and the core principles and basic methodology of impact evaluation.

During the conference, CEEE led the participants through a comprehensive training in impact evaluation and provided a forum for participants to share their own diverse experiences in the field of education development.  Participants also visited a field site for one of REAP's Computer Assisted Learning projects in order to understand how impact evaluation is conducted in the field.  Recalling the four day conference, one participant said, "Before, we all went out to look for the disease believing we already had the prescription in hand. Now we finally understand how to analyze the causal chain underlying a problem in order to find a real solution."

The first in a series of workshops, this conference marks a step forward in REAP's overarching goal to promote evidence-based action in China and bring about effective and cost-efficient education policies and programs for the benefit of rural China's children.

Read more (in Chinese) here.

The Europe Center Graduate Student Grant Competition

Call for Proposals:

The Europe Center is pleased to announce the Fall 2014 Graduate Student Grant Competition for graduate and professional students at Stanford whose research or work focuses on Europe. Funds are available for Ph.D. candidates from across a wide range of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences to prepare for dissertation research and to conduct research on approved dissertation projects. The Europe Center also supports early graduate students who wish to determine the feasibility of a dissertation topic or acquire training relevant for that topic. Moreover, funds are available for professional students whose interests focus on some aspect of European politics, economics, history, or culture; the latter may be used to support an internship or a research project. Grants range from $500 to $5000.

Additional information about the grants, as well as the online application form, can be found here.  The deadline for this Fall’s competition is Friday, October 17th. Recipients will be notified by November 7th. A second competition is scheduled for Spring 2015.
 

Highlights from 2013-2014:

In the 2013-2014 academic year, the Center awarded grants to 26 graduate students in departments ranging from Linguistics to Political Science to Anthropology. We would like to introduce you to some of the students that we support and the projects on which they are working. Our featured students this month are Michela Giorcelli (Economics) and Orysia Kulick (History).

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Undergraduate Internship Program: Highlights

The Europe Center sponsored four undergraduate student internships with leading think tanks and international organizations in Europe in Summer 2014.  Laura Conigliaro (International Relations, 2015) joined the Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS), while Elsa Brown (Political Science, 2015), Noah Garcia (BA International Relations and MA Public Policy, 2015), and Jana Persky (Public Policy, 2016) joined Bruegel, a leading European think tank. Our featured student this month is Laura Conigliaro.

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Recap:  Panel on Europe-Russia Relations and EU expansion

On September 30, 2014, Miroslav Lajčák, the Deputy Prime Minister and the Minister of Foreign and European Affairs of the Slovak Republic, participated in a panel discussion in which he shared his thoughts and opinions about Europe’s relationship with Russia, and about the E.U.’s management of its future membership and associations. The Minister’s viewpoints were of particular interest, given his role in the E.U. foreign policy establishment, and the Slovak Republic’s role in the E.U. and NATO.

“The fact is that E.U.-Russia relations have worsened dramatically. That cannot be denied. But it’s not E.U. enlargement that played a major role in this.”  According to the Minister, Russia did not view E.U. enlargement with hostility, in part, because enlargement remained a transparent process. “But it all changed when Europe decided to enter into Russia’s immediate neighborhood...the former Soviet Republics. And this was something that

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Minister Lajčák’s brought a variety of experiences to the panel. He served as the European Union Chief Negotiator for the E.U.-Ukraine and E.U.-Moldova Association Agreements, and was the European Union Special Representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Sarajevo. Additionally, he was previously the Ambassador of the Slovak Republic to the Former Republic of Yugoslavia, Albania and the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. 

After Minister Lajčák spoke, he was followed by comments by Michael McFaul, Professor of Political Science and Senior Fellow, Hoover Institute and Freeman Spogli Institute; Norman Naimark, the Robert and Florence McDonnell Professor in East European Studies in the History Department and The Director of Stanford Global Studies; and Kathryn Stoner, Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute and Faculty Director of the Susan Ford Dorsey Program in International Studies.

Introducing “Immigration and Integration in Europe” Policy Lab

The Europe Center would like to introduce a new research project entitled, “Immigration and Integration in Europe:  A Public Policy Perspective,” led by Professors David Laitin and Jens Hainmueller. Duncan Lawrence has recently joined Stanford University to help direct the project. The project is part of the new Policy Implementation Lab at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.

The social and economic integration of its diverse and ever growing immigrant populations is one of the most fundamental and pressing policy issues European countries face today. Success or failure in integrating immigrants is likely to have a substantial effect on the ability of European countries individually and collectively as members of the European Union to achieve objectives ranging from the profound such as sustaining a robust democratic culture to the necessary such as fostering economic cooperation between countries. Various policies have been devised to address this grave political dilemma, but despite heated public debates we know very little about whether these policies achieve their stated goals and actually foster the integration of immigrants into the host societies. (Inset: David Laitin)

The goal of this research program is to fill this gap and create a network of leading immigration scholars in the US and Europe to generate rigorous evidence about what works and what does not when it comes to integration policies. The methodological core of the lab’s research program is a focus on systematic impact evaluations that leverage experimental and quasi-experimental methods with common study protocols to quantify the social and economic returns to integration policies across Europe, including polices for public housing, education, citizenship acquisition, and integration contracts for newcomers. This work will add to the quality of informed public debate on a sensitive issue, and create cumulative knowledge about policies that will be broadly relevant. (Inset: Jens Hainmueller)

The Europe Center Sponsored Events

We invite you to attend the following events sponsored or co-sponsored by The Europe Center:

Additional Details on our website
October 8-10, 2014
“War, Revolution and Freedom: the Baltic Countries in the 20th Century”
Stauffer Auditorium, Hoover Institution
9:00 AM onward

Save the Date
April 24-25, 2015
Conference on Human Rights

A collaborative effort between the International Human Rights and Conflict Resolution Clinic at Stanford Law School (IHRCRC), the Research Center for Human Rights at Vienna University (RCHR), and The Europe Center. The conference will focus on the pedagogy and practice of human rights. 

Save the Date
May 20-22, 2015
TEC Lectureship on Europe and the World 
Joel Mokyr
Robert H. Strotz Professor of Arts and Sciences, and Professor of Economics and History, Northwestern University

We welcome you to visit our website for additional details.

Ronald I. McKinnon, a renowned scholar of international economics, has died. A primary focus of McKinnon’s work was on East Asia, including the currency crisis of 1997-98 and Japan’s liquidity trap. The Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center remembers him with gratitude for his collaboration on research activities and participation in many public seminars. An article written by the Stanford News Service recognizes his contributions to the Stanford community and beyond.

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McKinnon was born in Edmonton, Canada, on July 10, 1935. He joined the Stanford economics faculty in 1961 as an assistant professor. He received tenure in 1966, was promoted to full professor in 1969 and eventually became a chaired professor. He earned his bachelor's degree in economics from the University of Alberta in 1956 and his doctorate in economics from the University of Minnesota in 1961.

McKinnon was an applied economist whose primary interests were international economics and economic development. Understanding financial institutions and monetary institutions was central to his teaching and research. A prolific writer, he wrote or co-authored nine books and penned numerous articles and commentary pieces for economic journals and publications such as The Economist, the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal.

'Intellectual giant'

"SIEPR and the entire Stanford economics community lost a dear friend and an intellectual giant. We were lucky to have shared him for 53 years," said John Shoven, the director of the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research.

Shoven said McKinnon combined wit and wisdom. "He was both an intellectual powerhouse and a fun-loving colleague with a twinkle in his eye while he told a joke or two, or argued for his favorite unconventional theory."

McKinnon's wife, Margaret, said that her husband had a "second wind" of academic inquisitiveness that made his retirement years very active. "He did a lot of work on Asia and China, and was engaged with a whole new generation of economists and organizations."

She added that McKinnon loved economics. "He was a family man, but if something came up in economics, we knew where he would turn. His granddaughters remember him for his devotion to them and for his infectious passion for his work."

Financial repression

Along with his Stanford colleague the late Edward S. Shaw, McKinnon was among the first scholars to investigate "financial repression" as a substantial barrier to successful economic development. Financial repression refers to policies that force savers to accept returns below the rate of inflation and that enable banks to provide cheap loans to companies and governments to reduce the burden of their debt repayments.

His first book, published in 1973, Money and Capital in Economic Development, analyzed why the prevailing economic doctrines of the time had become too tolerant of inflation and of state interventions in the credit mechanism. McKinnon noted that without proper constraints, politicians were only too tempted to direct the flow of credit to suit their own ends.

He suggested strategies to escape financial repression in his 1993 book, The Order of Economic Liberalization: Financial Control in the Transition to a Market Economy. In it, he outlined how to liberalize government policies in domestic finance and foreign trade as a way to create more open markets.

McKinnon's other major area of interest was the study of international money and finance. He probed how the use of national currencies allows international trade to be effectively monetized and multilateral rather than bartered and bilateral.

Those rules of the game, McKinnon noted, can only be understood by considering the historical perspective – from the late 19th-century gold standard, the Bretton Woods Agreement of 1945 and the postwar dollar standard.

In Money in International Exchange: The Convertible Currency System (1979), McKinnon analyzed why and how the dollar came to be used as an international vehicle and reserve currency among banks and the primary currency of invoice in international commodity trade.

In his 1996 book, The Rules of the Game: International Money and Exchange Rates, McKinnon discoursed on macroeconomics and how the dollar standard could have been modified to make the world economy more stable in the postwar era.

East Asia, China and students

In his later years, McKinnon focused on East Asia and the great currency crisis of 1997-98 in that region, as well as Japan's liquidity trap. With Kenichi Ohno, McKinnon wrote Dollar and Yen: Resolving Economic Conflict between the United States and Japan (1997).

"His work had a following all over the world," said Shoven. "This was brought home to me in 1979 when I was visiting the London School of Economics and Ron McKinnon came to give a seminar. The faculty and students were so anxious to hear Ron that the seminar room was standing room only."

McKinnon was deeply engaged with his students – both graduate and undergraduate – many of who went on to write doctoral dissertations or senior undergraduate honors theses under his mentorship.

Throughout his career, McKinnon traveled internationally to conferences and for consulting with central banks and monetary authorities in Asia, Latin America, North America and Europe. He worked with international agencies such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank, among others.

He is survived by his wife, Margaret Learmonth McKinnon, and three children – Neil Charles McKinnon of San Francisco; Mary Elizabeth McKinnon Villeneuve of Redlands, California; and David Bruce McKinnon, of Ottawa, Canada; and seven grandchildren. Plans for a memorial service have not yet been announced.

Clifton Parker is a writer for the Stanford News Service.