After all these positive surprises from the last few weeks, here is some more good news, brought to you by the T2M network!

As Fabien Tripier announced before the summer, I will be taking over the T2M organization for the next four years. I fully intend to follow in his footsteps when it comes to promoting ambitious research and fruitful interactions.

To start with, I am happy to announce the creation of a formal non-profit association “Theories and Methods in Macroeconomics”, whose goal is to keep the network well alive, by finding creative ways of ensuring broad participation to our events, especially when it comes to welcoming young macroeconomists to our profession. I’d like to take the occasion to thank Thomas Brand, Axelle Ferrière, Céline Poilly, and Fabien Tripier who have all stepped in as founding members of the T2M association and are the current members of the board. The scientific committee remains unchanged and will keep its role of providing scientific validation and selecting the papers presented at our yearly conference.

Speaking of the conference, we have decided to delay the 2021 conference to the Autumn, obviously due to Covid uncertainty. The good news is, it will take place in London on November 4th-5th, 2021. It will be hosted by King’s College. Local committee will consist of Rana Sajedi (Bank of England), Antonio Mele (LSE/Centre for Macroeconomics) and Francesca Monti (King’s College). You can already save the date in your agenda! We plan to wait until late Spring before issuing the Call for Papers, so that, when we do, we’ll know for certain the conference can take place, in all its British glory.

The decision to postpone the conference until it can be held physically was motivated by the fact that most people are left unhappy with real conferences gone virtual. However, this should not prevent us from organizing other kinds of events that would be better suited to online participation. In particular, there is no reason to give up on the fun part of conferences, where we get to socialize and to argue against each other in informal discussions.

So, the T2M committee has decided to devote itself to running experiments to find out which kind of research interactions work well online, and what kind of technology is adequate or will soon be. In the Spring, we plan to organize smaller scale research events using online socializing tools. For instance, we would like to experiment with online poster sessions, test synchronous or asynchronous ways to present papers using videos, try out virtual reality headsets, these kinds of things. All of that will be open to all those who are interested, and, let’s admit it, ready to face the teething problems. Overall, we believe it is the perfect time to experiment and some of these new ways to interact might make a way into our future, low carbon-emission, post-Covid world.

This series of events, codenamed T3M for now, should span broadly from the beginning of March until the end of June, and take place roughly twice a month. We’ll get back to you very soon with a more detailed agenda and practical details.

In the meantime, I wish you all the very best,

Pablo Winant

Associate Professor of Economics, ESCP Business School

Affiliate Professor and Researcher, CREST / Ecole Polytechnique