Thread by @arpitrage

🚨 Videos from Virtual Finance and Economics conference🚨

Huge thanks to program organizers: @ProfSongMa @EmilyNix100 @paulgp @florianederer @lukestein, presenters and all participants! Links to papers, videos, and virtual conference planning guide below. 👇

"Common Ownership and Market Entry: Evidence from Pharmaceutical Industry" by @melissa_newham, Jo Seldeslachts, Albert Banal-Estañol and moderated by @katewaldock

papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf…

"Does Credit Affect Stock Trading? Evidence From the South Sea Bubble" by @BraggionFabio Rik Frehen and Emiel Jerphanion and moderated by @chenzix

papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf…

"Social Security and Trends in Inequality" by @sc_cath @NatashaRSarin @mjmill611 and moderated by Eric Zwick

papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf…

"The Semblance of Success in Nudging Consumers to Pay Down Credit Card Debt" by Paul Adams, @gk_ben , Lucy Hayes, Stefan Hunt, David Laibson, and Neil Stewart and moderated by @PagelMichaela

fca.org.uk/publication/oc…

"Manipulation-Proof Machine Learning" by @danbjork , Joshua Blumenstock, and Samsun Knight and moderated by @jannspiess

arxiv.org/abs/2004.03865

"Pandemics Depress the Economy, Public Health Interventions Do Not: Evidence from the 1918 Flu" by Sergio Correia, @StephanLuck, and @EmilVerner

papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf…

"Risk Taking during a Global Crisis: Evidence from Wuhan" by Di Bu, @tobinbridge, Yin Liao, and Yong Liu

papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf…

"The Financial Impacts of the US Coronavirus Outbreak" by @ray_kluender, @jialanw , and Jeyul Yang. See some estimates here:

https://twitter.com/jialanw/status/1250908069510479872

"Optimal Mitigation Policies in a Pandemic: Social Distancing and Working from Home" by Callum J. Jones, Thomas Philippon, Venky Venkateswaran. All COVID papers moderated by @thesugar

nber.org/papers/w26984

Okay, so you want to plan an online conference. How to go about it?

First choice to make is whether you want a "meeting" or "webinar." Log onto your Zoom account to access; webinars may be a request-only feature if you have an institutional account.

Webinars give additional functionality nice for groups: you have a layer of panelists separate from participants. However, you can't do breakrooms. We went with a meeting, for this reason.

To use those breakrooms, go into Settings/In Meeting (Advanced) and toggle them on. That opens up a breakroom option, and you can automatically assign participants to separate rooms for breaks if you want.

Other defaults you want to change:
- Mute people on entry
- Don't allow unmuting (can change in Q&A sessions)
- DON'T play the entry/exit chime
- Put Participants in waiting room (optional, but helps avoid zoom bombers)

That's basically it. So you have to:

- Set up the Zoom Meeting/Webinar, share the link
- Invite people into meeting when it starts, designate speakers as co-hosts so they can unmute and share screen
- Change settings
- Manage breakout rooms + recording

Next, Slack integration, which is a great feature that @prof_cookson innovated. Just go to Slack, and create a new workspace for your conference.

There, you will want to create separate channels for each paper

In each channel, you post the paper. Then, you assign a person (@prof_cookson calls them "facilitators" we went with "paper chairs") to kick off the discussion with some initial questions and thoughts on paper

The idea is that this "faciliator" or "paper chair" role is intermediate a typical discussant and chair. Read the paper beforehand, start off with thoughts, participate in the subsequent discussion, and manage Q&A—but don't need to make slides.

Then, the discussion continues in Slack while the author presents. There are several reasons this is a nice way of organizing it:

- Really engages people, valuable for on-line. Takes that side conversation you have during the conference, and makes it public.
- Emojis and gifs actually valuable to engage with what other people are saying
- Can have threaded in-depth discussion of specific points

- Unlike Zoom chat, you have a name/profile (can add photos) to make more personal
- Can link to other papers (more precise than saying "Didn't Chetty have some paper...")
- Co-authors can participate in Slack, to respond to clarifying questions

For participants—this gives a way to engage more substantially than you would just sitting at a usual conference.

For authors—you get really detailed and written down feedback you can then think about and address down the road.

Slack discussion happens during the presentation. Then "paper chair" collects these thoughts, asks the presenter in Q&A (presenter does not need to monitor Slack). Next, in break, author stay in main room + people sent to break rooms, can exit to main and follow up with speaker.

Overall reflections

Virtual conferences are good way to get a community together, quickly, to discuss whatever you like. We went with a pretty broad theme here, but it probably makes more sense for narrower topics to get interested folks around the world (as @prof_cookson does)

They are also nice for inclusion purposes—you will get many more folks to sign up for a Zoom, or even have access to videos after, than you will fit into the Royal Sonesta. Finding ways to scale our activities is valuable, IMO

Ultimately, it is going to be hard to replicate the networking aspects of conferences online. You might not find your next co-author at a virtual conference. But I think there is room to experiment here too—discipline specific Slacks and co-author matching would be great

You have lots of people jump in and out of conference; or participate in Zoom but not Slack. I think this is fine—makes it easier to jump in for just the session you want, at engagement level you prefer. Different conferences can make their own tradeoffs.

I think we should be cognizant that increasing scale is usually good, but generally boosts inequality. Some of the larger virtual seminars, for instance, invite big names with massive attendance. Nothing wrong with that, but makes it a more winner take all world

So I think it's valuable to think about ways that virtual/digital technologies can also increase participation of everyone, as not just serve as larger megaphones for those who already have access to tools. That's it! Hope you enjoyed the conference/reflections

Wrong link! Correct one here:

and EDIT right YouTube link for "The Semblance of Success in Nudging Consumers to Pay Down Credit Card Debt":