To present a paper at the Spring Meeting of Young Economists, please submit an up to 3
page summary, a so called extended abstract, of your paper by December 1st 2003
at latest.
Extended abstracts are sent to the referees in December. Decisions should take place by early February 2003.
Note, that the referee process is double-blind (you do not know the identity of the referee just as she does
not know yours). This makes the refereeing-process as objective as possible – and even distinguishes the Spring
Meeting from some of the “big” conferences and journals. The referees themselves are to the very most junior
fellows.
However, the Spring Meeting has become a larger conference as well, maybe a bit more bustling and surely more
living. Nonetheless, or maybe because of that many very interesting ideas and papers were discussed and
competition for presentation was quite fierce in recent years. With about 800 submissions and only room for
approximately 200 presentations in Paris, a lot of good papers had to be rejected. This year the conference will
consist of 64 sessions and will again host about 200 presented papers.
So you might ask, why then do we use extended abstracts only?
Most Ph.D. programmes start in fall and begin with one-year coursework. So usually most first year Ph.D.
students cannot do a lot of research while their first year and start writing papers in the summer following
enrolment.
Because of that, only very few people have a completed paper ready in the winter term of their second year in the
doctoral programme. However, we want to give the opportunity of presenting and discussing their ideas to the
broadest possible group of young researchers to make the conference as inspiring as possible.
Thus we have chosen to have only extended abstracts for submission and we encourage submission of pieces
work, which are yet incomplete but can be expected to be completed by the time of the conference. Of course we do
not want people presenting just the outline of their ideas.
Moreover, we are going to assign a discussant to each paper presented. In order to make this possible, please send
in a completed paper upon notification of acceptance, so that discussants will have enough time to read it.
Of course extended abstracts have drawbacks as well, we cannot assure that what you claim to have
shown; proven
or found is really the case. We can only appeal to your honesty, to make the submission process as fair as
possible.
See you in Leuven,
Christian Bayer
Tibor Neugebauer
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