AI & Economics Summer Institute

We are thrilled to welcome you to the 2026 AI & Economics Summer Institute, hosted by the Center for Applied AI (CAAI) at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business on the University of Chicago campus.

 

Institute: Aug 6-10, 2026 • Conference: Aug 11, 2026 • Venue: Saieh Hall 021
  
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OverviewScheduleSpeakers
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Overview

The program runs in two phases:

  • An intensive workshop series followed by a research conference.

This page is your hub for the schedule, people attending, and everything you need to get here.

Phase 1 | Institute

Workshop sessions & office hours

Aug 6–10
Saieh Hall 021      

Phase 2 | Conference

Keynotes & research sessions

Aug 11
Saieh Hall 021

Participants

Graduate researchers from 20+ institutions

Plus faculty speakers & organizers
 

Schedule

Click a day to open its program. Sessions are at Chicago Booth; meals and breaks are on site.

Session names reflect the general topic of each presentation — they are not official talk titles and may change.

      Thursday, August 6Institute       
                                                                                                
8:00–8:30 Breakfast
8:30–10:00 LLMs + Overview
Sanjog Misra · Chicago Booth
10–10:30 Break
10:30–12:00 Architecture
Sanjog Misra · Chicago Booth
12:00–1:00 Lunch
1:00–2:30 Asset Embeddings
Ralph Koijen · Chicago Booth
2:30–3:00 Break
3:00–4:30 AI Safety
Sarah Cen · Carnegie Mellon
4:30–6:15 Office Hours
5:45–7:15 Welcome Reception · Plein Air Optional
    
    
      Friday, August 7Institute       
                                                                                                         
8:00–8:30 Breakfast
8:30–10:00 Law & Policy
Sarah Cen · Carnegie Mellon
10:00–10:30 Break
10:30–12:00 World Models
Randall Balestriero · Brown University
12:00–1:00 Lunch
1:00–2:30 Tools for Economic Research
Ben Golub · Northwestern
2:30–3:00 Break
3:00–4:30 Post-training
Kawin Ethayarajh · Chicago Booth
4:30–6:15 Office Hours
6:15–7:00 UChicago Campus Tour Optional
7:00–9:00 The Pub Optional
    
    
      Saturday, August 8Institute       
                                                                                                
8:00–8:30 Breakfast
8:30–10:00 Productivity & Labor Markets
Lindsey Raymond · MIT
10:00–10:30 Break
10:30–12:00 AI Exposure
Daniel Rock · Wharton, UPenn
12:00–1:00 Lunch
1:00–2:30 Continual Learning
Jessy Lin · UC Berkeley
2:30–3:00 Break
3:00–4:30 Building LLM Classifiers
Daniel Rock · Wharton, UPenn
4:30–6:15 Office Hours
~5:30 Box lunches · Free evening (details to follow)
    
    
      Sunday, August 9Free Day       
                        
Free Day · No scheduled sessions
4:00–5:30 Chicago Architecture Boat Tour Optional
    
    
      Monday, August 10Institute       
                                                                                                         
8:00–8:30 Breakfast
8:30–10:00 AI-Enabled Complex Work
Suproteem Sarkar · Chicago Booth
10:00–10:30 Break
10:30–12:00 AI-Powered Data Processing
Shreya Shankar · UC Berkeley
12:00–1:00 Lunch
1:00–2:30 Displacement
Alex Imas · Chicago Booth
2:30–3:00 Break
3:00–3:30 Mini Hackathon
3:30–4:30 Open Discussion on the Future of Research
4:30–6:15 Office Hours
6:00–8:00 Closing Dinner · Location TBA Expected
    
    
      Tuesday, August 11Conference       
               
All day AIE Summer Conference · Details to follow
    


Social events (receptions, tours, The Pub) are optional. Attendance at the Monday closing dinner is expected.

 

Invited Speakers

 

Organizers

Alex Imas

Alex Imas

Roger L. and Rachel M. Goetz Professor of Behavioral Science, Economics and Applied AI and Vasiliou Faculty Scholar

Alex Imas
 

Participants    

 

Graduate researchers and postdocs joining from institutions worldwide. Click any name to see their field and research focus.

Gonzalo ArrietaUniversity of Zurich
Behavioral & Experimental Economics

How people navigate complex choices and judge what is good for others; how AI agents align with human welfare and paternalistic judgments.

Gonzalo BallesteroPennsylvania State University
PhD · Economics

Industrial organization, market design, and the economics of AI; current work examines AI agents as a new class of economic actors and their implications for organizations, markets, and policy.

Salvador CandelasYale University
Postdoc · Market Design

Economic theory for market design, with a growing focus on the theoretical foundations of AI — including how users productively interact with AI agents that may be misinformed or misaligned.

Hong ChenUniversity of Michigan
PhD · Information Science

Computational social science, with a focus on the intersection of AI and innovation.

Manuel CherepMIT
PhD · AI & Behavioral Science

How AI agents behave, where they diverge from humans, and how to redesign them to better align with human values.

Marleen de JongeUniversity of Amsterdam
PhD · AI & Econometrics

Uses information retrieval to measure hard-to-capture economic phenomena (climate finance, production networks) and studies how algorithmic systems reshape economic outcomes, with a focus on fairness and financial stability.

Eduardo Duque RosasLondon School of Economics
PhD · Economics & Management

Labor economics, organizational economics, and the economics of AI — how generative AI reshapes how firms organize work, set wages, and shape careers in emerging economies. Also works on matching and market design.

Enas FaragUniversity of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
PhD · Economics

Labor economics and industrial organization; currently extracting and analyzing non-wage amenities from online job postings. Previously an Economic Researcher at the Egyptian Competition Authority.

Cristiana FirulloCornell University
PhD · Information Science

Studies how AI and personalization algorithms reshape consumer attention, search behavior, and competition in digital markets, and the welfare effects of privacy regimes. Runs the Internet Behavior Experiment; also a Visiting Scholar at Stanford Economics.

Samira GholamiStanford University
PhD · Economics

Industrial organization and public economics, including the economics of platforms, AI, competition, and digital markets.

Maria Del Mar GomezUniversity of Chicago
PhD · Economics

Applications of AI in developing countries.

Joshua GrossStanford University
PhD · Economics

Industrial organization, market design, and ML methods — combining the flexibility of ML with the interpretability of structural models, with applications in healthcare.

Yifan GuoStanford GSB
PhD Candidate

Human-AI interaction, algorithmic decision-making, and the evaluation of AI agents.

Jasmin HigoHarvard University
PhD · Health Economics

Health systems and health economics, examining how various shocks impact health outcomes and livelihoods. Previously worked at the World Bank and international NGOs advancing health policy.

Guohui JiangUniversity of Cologne
Postdoc · Economics

Intersection of economic history, political economy, and labor economics.

Enoch Hyunwook KangUniversity of Washington
Researcher · Marketing

Develops methods for marketing decision-making using AI alignment, causal ML, online experimentation, structural econometrics, reinforcement-learning theory, and AI agents.

Jivat Neet KaurUC Berkeley
PhD · BAIR / Computational Precision Health

Foundations for reliable AI in dynamic social contexts — how uncertainty, incentives, and policy mechanisms interact in real deployments, often motivated by healthcare.

Richard LombardoHarvard University
PhD · Economics

Applied microeconomics and econometrics.

Ester MuzychukUC Berkeley
PhD · Economics

ML and causal inference for social outcomes, including LLMs and large text corpora in empirical economics and unstructured clinical narratives in emergency care.

Ryohei OishiUniversity College London
PhD · Economics

Macroeconometrics and applied macroeconomics — business cycles, monetary and fiscal policy, and integrating unstructured data and ML into structural macro models.

Yechan ParkHarvard University
PhD · Economics

Econometric theory, applied econometrics, and machine learning.

Laura PittalisUniversity of Chicago
PhD · Economics

Macroeconomics, focused on how micro-level heterogeneity shapes monetary and fiscal policy, and the political economy of Europe's economic stagnation.

Lauren RiceHarvard University
PhD · Economics

How technology affects healthcare markets, behavior, and outcomes in low- and middle-income countries, and how AI can be deployed to improve patient outcomes.

Peyman ShahidiMIT
PhD · Economics

Market design and labor economics, focused on the effects of AI on labor markets and online platforms.

Yucheng ShangMIT
PhD · Economics

Econometric theory for robust causal inference and structural estimation, building on ideas from machine learning, statistical decision theory, and partial identification.

Annie UlichneyUC Berkeley
PhD · Statistics

Design and evaluation of algorithmic and AI-supported decision systems under realistic informational constraints, at the intersection of statistics, ML, and economics.

Haichuan WangHarvard University
PhD · Computer Science

Intersection of generative AI, sequential decision-making, and game theory, with applications to societal decision-making and human-AI alignment.

Yutong YanCUHK Business School
PhD · Finance

Large language models in asset pricing and the broader use of AI in finance, including lookahead and extrapolation bias and time-aware pretraining.

Lu YangUNC Chapel Hill · Kenan-Flagler
PhD · Finance

Behavioral finance, market microstructure, and information economics, with an AI focus on investor behavior, expectation formation, and AI's impact on investment decisions and belief formation.

Yang YuMIT · FutureTech
Postdoctoral Researcher

Empirical industrial organization and the economics of AI.

Lehan ZhangETH Zurich
PhD · Law & Economics

Applied microeconomics and data science, combining causal inference with NLP and ML to study media, political economics, culture, and identity.

June ZhuYale University
PhD · Economics

Microeconomic theory and behavioral models of AI and human-AI relations, including mechanism design to improve the learnability, interpretability, and performance of AI.

 

FAQ

More details—including accommodations, pre-readings, and office hours—will be shared in July. Check back closer to the program.