Great Problems, Great Minds Seminar Series: Understanding the Impact of Local Economic Change

Join the Department of Social Sciences for this Great Problems, Great Minds seminar series event featuring guest speaker Bjorn Markeson, academic divisional executive/economist who is the lead economist working with IMPLAN’s academic users. 

In times of economic change, local policymakers need tools to understand the effects of both existing economic institutions and changes to the local economy. In a world awash in data, it can still be hard to find quality local data and build it into easy-to-use and theoretically tractable economic models. This talk will show how input-output and social accounting matrix models can be used to better understand local economic drivers, such as a university—specifically how the university impacts the local economy in both an ongoing basis and through construction of new facilities.

Bio

Bjorn Markeson is the academic divisional executive/economist who is the lead economist working with IMPLAN’s academic users, and he also teaches a course in urban and regional economics at Brandeis University. He grew up in rural northern Minnesota and attended the University of Wisconsin-Madison prior to serving the United States Peace Corps in Honduras, with a focus on municipal development. His work in Honduras was responsible for the development of dozens of computer labs (the first in these rural communities). Upon returning to the U.S., he studied urban and regional planning at Cornell University and his doctoral work at the University of Wisconsin-

Madison investigated drivers of rural small business growth and entrepreneurship.

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