In its first year of full programming, Rice University’s Paris Center has provided a hub for teaching, learning and research that has brought together participants from all over the globe.
“It’s in such a good location,” associate professor of economics Zach Bethune said of the center’s presence in the vibrant, diverse Marais district.
Bethune, along with colleagues from the University of California, Irvine and the Université Panthéon-Assas, organized the 2024 Rice-Paris Monetary Conference, which was hosted by the Rice Global Paris Center.
“It’s a very focused group of researchers working on important topics such as monetary and fiscal policy and the design and regulation of the banking system, and we want a lot of interaction between current doctoral students and current faculty, both in Europe and in the U.S.,” Bethune said. “We invite doctoral students to present their papers the first day, then we pair them with discussants of those papers, which are faculty or other researchers. Those faculty and researchers will present on the second day.”
They did so in the centuries-old meeting rooms throughout the Paris Center, which allowed the group of roughly 25 to come together when needed but also to splinter off into smaller groups as well. Though the first Rice-Paris Monetary Conference in 2023 was held at a different location, Bethune said he’s confident the third annual meeting of monetary economics minds will reconvene at the Paris Center.
“The staff has everything taken care of that you might need for a program,” Bethune said. “It’s so easy for us to focus on the research and let the excellent administrators handle the logistics.”
On occasion, that means helping groups find a partner space that fits their needs. The New Advances in Family Economics Workshop, for example, had more than 60 participants. The Paris Center staff was able to accommodate the group at the nearby Club de la Chasse et de la Nature. Co-sponsored by Rice, KU Leuven and Université Libre de Bruxelles, the workshop featured 14 presentations on topics such as family consumption decisions, women’s conditions in low-income countries and how marital incomes influence education decisions.
“We are thinking about how people make decisions, which affects the economy, and also we are looking at how the economy in general affects the decisions of people in families,” said Rossella Calvi, assistant professor of economics at Rice.
She added that having the workshop in a central location, such as the Paris Center, allows organizers to draw more international researchers.
“There are consistent themes, but understanding differences across different contexts is part of what drives our research as well,” Calvi said. “For example, the sort of questions related to family economics that pertain to India or China might be different relative to the type of questions that we address in the United States, Europe, sub-Saharan Africa or Latin America. Understanding the cultural context is very, very important when we try to answer these questions.”
To learn more about programming and events at the Paris Center, click here.
