Schedule

Sheraton Grand Chicago
301 East North Water Street
Chicago, IL 60611

Keynote conversation between Anil Kashyap, the Stevens Distinguished Service Professor of Economics and Finance at Chicago Booth, and Brian Niccol, MBA '03, chairman and chief executive officer of Starbucks Coffee Company. 

The Evolution and Future of Private Equity. 
Speakers: Marcel Erni, MBA ’91, co-founder of Partners Group, and Steven Neil Kaplan, the Neubauer Family Distinguished Service Professor of Entrepreneurship and Finance and the Kessenich E.P. Faculty Director at the Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation

Partners Group, founded in 1996, is a Swiss-based global private equity firm with over $170 billion in assets under management. With over 20 offices worldwide, the firm is committed to expanding access to private markets for individual investors. During this session, Erni and Kaplan will discuss the formation and growth of Partners Group, and the evolution and possible future of private capital markets.

A Little More Social. 
Speaker: Nicholas Epley, the John Templeton Keller Distinguished Service Professor of Behavioral Science and a Neubauer Family Faculty Fellow

Epley argues that reaching out and connecting with other people makes us happier, healthier, and more successful in life, and yet we are often reluctant to do so. He suggests that our expectations about social interaction are guided by static features of the interaction—such as whom we’re talking with and what we’re talking about—while our actual experiences are driven by the dynamic properties of the interaction, particularly the back-and-forth responsiveness of a live exchange. In this session, Epley will explore this gap he sees between the factors that guide our social expectations and those that shape our actual social experiences, how this gap can lead us to make unwise choices about how to interact with other people and create markets for products, and how understanding why social interactions turn out as they do can allow us to make wiser choices about how to engage with others. 

Trade Policy and Topics in Global Macroeconomics. 
Speaker: Brent Neiman, the Edward Eagle Brown Professor of Economics

In this session, Neiman will examine current US trade policy and other topics in global macroeconomics. He will respond directly to the most recent policy changes at the time of the conference, pulling from his expertise as former counselor to the secretary and deputy undersecretary for international finance at the US Treasury, where he worked on a broad set of international economic issues, including the bilateral relationship with China, the response to Russia’s war in Ukraine, emerging market sovereign debt, IMF governance and programs, and global financial regulation.

AI Meets Statistics: Intelligence Under Uncertainty. 
Speaker: Veronika Rockova, the Bruce Lindsay Professor of Econometrics and Statistics in the Wallman Society of Fellows

In this session, Rockova will highlight the symbiotic relationship between Statistics and AI. Statistics provides the foundation for reasoning under uncertainty, while AI furthers its reach by unlocking new analytical capabilities. She will explore how these synergistic interactions can translate into practical benefits across modern data science, with a particular focus on healthcare. The session will highlight how AI is reshaping the way we think about data analysis, representation, and acquisition. Rockova will then present an application in AI-assisted cancer detection from high-resolution histopathology images. This research illustrates the power of transformer architectures, which underpin today’s leading language and vision models. Through this session, Rockova will demonstrate how modern AI tools, when combined with statistical thinking, can deliver decision-grade predictions with principled safeguards.

Is Monopoly Power Larger Now? 
Speaker: Chad Syverson, the George C. Tiao Distinguished Service Professor of Economics

In this session, Syverson will examine whether the average level of market power in the economy has risen. By highlighting the evidence that employee pay is being held back by monopoly power, that price-cost margins appear to have grown for decades, and that common ownership, where a single asset holder (for example, a passive equity mutual fund) owns parts of multiple companies in the same industry, Syverson will examine the key questions that arise about anti-competitive behavior in multiple markets.›

Dynamic Pricing: Is it Fair? 
Speaker: Jean-Pierre Dubé, the James M. Kilts Distinguished Service Professor of Marketing and a Charles E. Merrill Faculty Scholar

In this session, Dubé will posit that the public is suspicious of any kind of price adjustments that aren’t due to changing cost, by citing recent backlash against companies employing dynamic pricing. He will clarify the meaning of dynamic pricing, detail the range of pricing structures that fall under this umbrella, and demonstrate how this pricing can create incremental profits for businesses. Dubé will argue that dynamic pricing represents how modern AI technology and data analytics can potentially enable firms to drive profit growth. He will also explore how customers could benefit from dynamic pricing, building the argument that dynamic pricing is not zero-sum, and that both firms and customers can simultaneously benefit.

Can Modern AI Models Explain and Understand Financial Markets? 
Speaker: Ralph S.J. Koijen, the AQR Capital Management Distinguished Service Professor of Finance and a Fama Faculty Fellow

Given the rapid improvements of AI models across a wide array of domains, Koijen will explore in this session how AI models can be used in finance and asset management, and how their performance can be benchmarked. He will highlight the unique challenges of benchmarking and optimizing these new models. He will also review some of the latest research on this topic and suggest new benchmarks to accurately determine AI model understanding of the financial market.

Earning Instability and the Financial Fragility of American Workers. 
Speaker: Pascal Noel, the Singh Family Professor of Finance

In this session, Noel will discuss new research on earning instability among US workers, and how firms can mitigate this instability. He will also examine how these findings suggest that short-term earnings risk is a significant and previously underappreciated feature of the labor market. Using a new high-frequency administrative dataset, Noel will show that the majority of US workers experience substantial month-to-month fluctuations in pay, even when continuously employed. He will demonstrate how this earning instability is both pervasive and unequally distributed, arising in large part from firm-driven fluctuations in hours. After emphasizing how this earning instability creates a meaningful source of economic risk, he will then examine how it increases both consumption volatility and rates of job separation.

Business and Politics. 
Speakers: Pete Ricketts, AB ’86, MBA ’91, United States senator for Nebraska, and Madhav Rajan, dean and the George Shultz Professor of Accounting for Chicago Booth and chief global strategist for the University of Chicago

Ricketts is the founder of Drakon, LLC, which supports Nebraskan entrepreneurs and startup companies, and a past board member, president, and COO, of Ameritrade. He was formerly governor of Nebraska and currently serves as one of the United States senators for Nebraska. During this session, Ricketts and Rajan will discuss public service and business, specifically examining Ricketts’s emphasis on economic growth. Under Ricketts’ leadership, Nebraska won the Governor’s Cup for economic development for three consecutive years. Ricketts was also appointed to serve on the Council of Governors and the Advisory Committee for Trade Policy and Negotiations in December 2018.

Leading for Impact: Lessons from Operations Management. 
Speaker: Amy Ward, the Rothman Family Professor of Operations Management and the Charles M. Harper Faculty Fellow

In this session, Ward will explore operations management, the science of designing and improving systems within organizations and businesses to deliver products and services efficiently, reliably, and with impact. She suggests that operations management offers powerful tools for navigating complexity, making decisions under uncertainty, and aligning limited resources with strategic goals, and will examine how leadership intention can be executed through optimizing these tools.