you are going to meet some gentle people there.... a classic song goes, and it is still true today.

Western Economic Association International put together the perfect conference: outstanding keynotes, including the fantastic Raj Chetty , and the living legend and Nobel Prize winner Daniel McFadden, and a perfect location at the heart of San Francisco. What more can you ask for? Sessions with upcoming stars from Stanford, Berkeley San Diego and others? checked. A discussion between John Taylor (yes the  mind behind the Taylor rule) and Bob Gordon (a go-to name in the analysis of productivity changes) on the future of US economy? checked.

At this conference, GRAPE also participated with two papers. The first one discusses the reasons behind the low number of women on managerial and supervisory boards taking into account all firms operating in a market, unlike the previous literature that focused on stock listed (public) firms. We find that many of the explanatory factors identified in the previous literature fail to explain the lack of women once we expand the sample. This paper was presented in a session organized by the CSWEP, we want to thank them for accepting the paper and for the insightful discussion that followed.

The second paper is part of our ongoing research in retirement decisions. The paper models the behavior of spouses in an attempt to capture the spillover effects of changes in the retirement age. In other words, does increasing the retirement age of women affect employment decisions of men? The work is still on its early phase, but we already received many valuable comments.

Thank you to the organizers, and we hope to participate again in the upcoming editions!