Minutes of the Meeting of the Applied Econometrics Division May 22, 2014

Minutes of Weekly Meeting of Applied Econometrics Research Group: (meant to provide ideas on issues to be decided/ discussed at weekly meeting)

Minutes of Meeting of the Applied Econometrics Division May, 22, 2014

The Vice-Chancellor (Head of Division) chaired a meeting of applied econometrics division held on May, 22, 2014 at Vice Chancellor Office. The key agenda of the meeting was to sketch out the long term and short term goals of the division to improve the research activity. The followings are the key points of meeting:

1. Capability Development:

a. Individual Goal

i. Every member should plan his individual activity for the year 2014-15 and post it on his/her website. Activity should focus on skill development in some particular direction. This could be done by getting trainings, taking online courses, or directed study of collections of books and articles on recent topics. It should be updated by weekly progress. Plan can be provided on paper as well.

b. Collective Goal

i. Collective training sessions should be organized. The order will be from simple to complex. Our tentative target is to conduct four training sessions, roughly once a quarter. Other research divisions should also organize trainings. These sessions would be focused for PIDE students and faculty and secondly for researchers other than PIDE.

ii. Learning new theoretical and empirical developments for respective subject areas should be focus of the teaching/research staff. In this manner, they can progress in communicating new ideas to young brains and fruitful research in the respective subjects.

iii. Research and teaching faculty should be able to critique the research proposals and articles. Reading and analyzing recent research is very helpful in catching up with the latest developments in any field. Hassan Mohsin will allocate Ph.D. theses currently being written to members of our division, to allow for an external supervision. This will be helpful in capability development.

iv. The Vice-Chancellor constituted a team consisting of three members Dr. Attiya Javed, Ms. Amena Urooj and Mr. Muhammad Ramzan- to training workshops. First workshop is planned to be on EXCEL in June.

2. Research Grant

i. Members should develop individual or joint project for research grants form HEC SANDEE and other national and international institutes.

ii. Each division can act as consultant in their respective areas.

iii. The Vice-Chancellor assigned the responsibility of organizing data sets to Mr. Pervaiz Akhtar, Mr. jafar Hussion and Mr. Azkar Ahmad. The main task of data handling section is to maintain data bank which would be helpful for applied econometrics. One data available is in hand, we will consider what kinds of research are possible, and accordingly, which organizations to apply for research grants and funding.

POINT: It will be much easier to manage the large amounts of information which will be generated by progress reports of each individual if everyone launches and maintains information on their website – in line with our developing e-governance system. Paper records are cumbersome and inefficient, and subject to many kinds of problems. So all faculty/research are advised to launch their personal websites.