Research Meeting: Titus Galama

Our next GENE Amsterdam research meeting will be on Thursday, September 26 at 13:00. This will be a hybrid meeting:

• in person at the Amsterdam UMC (see mail for room)
• on Teams (see mail for link).

The speaker of this meeting will be Titus J. Galama. Titus is the director of the CESR Center for the Study of Health Inequality (CSHI), a Senior Economist at the University of Southern California’s (USC) Dornsife Center for Economic and Social Research (CESR), an Associate Professor at USC’s and VU Amsterdam’s Economics Departments, and a Research Fellow at the Tinbergen Institute, Amsterdam. He is an inter/multi-disciplinary researcher, having started in theoretical physics, then astro-physics, then strategy consulting, policy research, economics and now geno-economics.

• Title: The Economics and Econometrics of Gene–Environment Interplay
• Abstract: This talk concerns the potential uses of genetic data in economics, with a focus on estimating the interplay between genes (nature) and environments (nurture). The talk will highlight – in the context of an empirical illustration of the moderating effect of school-starting age on one’s genetic predisposition towards educational attainment – how economists can benefit from incorporating genetic data into their analyses, even when they do not have a direct interest in estimating genetic effects. It will be argued that gene–environment (GxE) studies can be instrumental for (i) assessing treatment effect heterogeneity, (ii) testing theoretical predictions, and (iii) uncovering mechanisms, thereby improving understanding of how (policy) interventions affect population subgroups.