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UofT team wins silver medal at the Econometric Game


Tom Stringham (captain), Nanxi Fu and Atom Vayalinkal represented the University of Toronto at the 2022 Econometric Game last month and proudly brought home the silver medal.

The Econometric Game is an annual three-day competition organized by the University of Amsterdam, where 30 teams from universities all over the world compete to write an econometrics paper on a case assigned by the organizers. After 14 hours over two days in the first round and another 9 hours in the second round, our team came in second place.

Hear from the captain:

The case this year had to do with inflation. In the first part of the competition, we were asked to estimate a Phillips curve (which relates inflation to labor market outcomes) for the Euro area. In the second part, where the top ten teams from the first round competed, we had to decompose inflation into supply and demand components. Like a lot of teams, we didn't have any macro specialists on our team so we came at the case with fresh eyes. For our wildcard variable, we brought in consumer survey data on inflation expectations, which ended up giving a lot of insight. We used recent SVAR methods for our main specifications that hadn't been applied to inflation before. I think it helped that we weren't afraid to dive into the literature and try new things. Most of our time was spent researching, and for both parts of the competition, our paper came together in the last few hours. We had a lot of fun!

Congratulations to the team!