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The Richmond Fed hosted 16 economists and presenters in early May during CORE Week, the Bank’s signature program for its researchers. The weeklong event included the inaugural Goodfriend Memorial Lecture, which featured Hugo Hopenhayn, professor of economics at UCLA, Guggenheim Fellow and long-term Richmond Fed research consultant, presenting his paper, “Knowledge Creation and Diffusion with Limited Appropriation,” which was co-authored with Liyan Shi.

CORE Week, which is the Collaboration of Research Economists (CORE) model, combines frontier research and an innovative delivery method to advance collaboration within the economics profession. The program is hosted eight times a year and brings together Richmond Fed economists and visiting economists from a range of disciplines for seminars, conferences, networking and collaboration.

“The topics discussed during CORE Week broaden our knowledge base and gives us opportunities to have in-depth conversations with visiting researchers about their impressive work,” said Thomas Lubik, senior advisor in the Bank’s Research department. “CORE Week is also an opportunity to connect with our long-term consultants who have contributed to the intellectual life in the department for years. The CORE Week model allows us to intensify this relationship. We feel that it is mutually beneficial.”

During the May 8 – 12 program, featured presentations included: “Investment, innovation, and Financial Frictions” presented by Thomas Winberry; “The Impact of Multinationals Along the Job Ladder” presented by Doireann Fitzgerald; and “The Quality-Adjusted Cyclical Price of Labor” presented by Mark Bils.

The week concluded with the Networks, Innovation and Productivity Conference, organized by Hopenhayn. The two-day event featured the research of leading scholars from the University of Chicago, Cornell, Princeton, UCLA, USC, Yale and the Atlanta Fed on how the efficiency of production is shaped by innovation and the way firms interact with each other, including spatial production networks, firm-to-firm trade and talent.

The Conference included numerous presentations, some of which were: “The Expansion of Product Varieties in the New Age of Advertising” presented by Salomé Baslandze, “Innovation Networks and R&D Allocation” presented by Ernest Liu, and “Firm-to-Firm Trade: Imports, Exports and the Labor Market” presented by Samuel Kortum.

Honoring Marvin Goodfriend

The paper that Hopenhayn presented for the Goodfriend Memorial Lecture, a new lecture series that honors the legacy of Marvin Goodfriend, long-time Richmond Fed economist, research director and senior policy advisor, highlighted how intellectual property rights must trade off incentives for innovation and knowledge diffusion, and consider the optimal assignment of property rights as a Ramsey problem in a dynamic model, where knowledge diffusion takes place under random-matching.

The Lecture is the latest Richmond Fed effort to honor Goodfriend, who served as research director, senior policy advisor and economist during his 27-year tenure at the Bank, until his retirement in 2005. Previous tributes include the Marvin S. Goodfriend Conference, which took place during CORE Week in May 2022, as well as Essays in Honor of Marvin Goodfriend: Economist and Central Banker, published the same year.