Today and Saturday, Oberlin College is hosting the WASH Economics Conference, an event co-organized by Oberlin, the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, and the Institute for Fiscal Studies.

The conference, funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation, brings together academics doing research on water supply, sanitation, and hygiene and health services. This is the third year the conference is happening, and the first time it is being held in the United States.

Associate Professor of Economics Evan Kresch, a co-organizer for the conference, explained the importance of creating a space for WASH economists to come together.

“Because there are so many different aspects to our sanitation, usually when there are conferences, we sort of get stuck in different spots,” Kresch said. “A person might be in the health papers, someone else might be in the behavioral papers. … This conference was really about bringing together WASH economists as we learn from each other.”

The conference is split into five sessions, along with two panelist presentations and a keynote address by Nobel Laureate and University of Chicago Professor Michael Kremer and Consulting Director of the University of Chicago Development Innovation Lab Witold Więcek. In each session, two to three economists will present papers. Kresch explained that because of the smaller size of this conference, he chose to mix together papers from different themes in each session, rather than grouping them together, in order to expose researchers to areas outside their own fields of study. 

College third-year Carlota Lorán López, one of the Economics students who will be attending the conference, expressed excitement for the opportunity.

“As students, we are very lucky that we get to experience an econ conference, especially on campus,” Lopez said. “I’m sure it will be extremely informative to learn about the work of such high-profile economists who study relevant topics of global development.”

College fourth-year Sam Fechner echoed these sentiments. 

“I’m especially looking forward to hearing the keynote from Nobel Laureate Michael Kremer, and seeing many of our own faculty members in their roles as discussants,” Fechner said. “In the honors seminar, we are currently having our final presentations, for which students step into the role of discussants, so it will be interesting to see how faculty members and other high-profile economists approach this task.”

Next year’s conference will be held in India. Kresch emphasized the importance of holding the conference in different locations in order to make it accessible to researchers from different regions.

“We’re trying to create a conference that could be held in worldwide venues so that we can capture a lot of people,” Kresch explained. “We’re trying to go to where the people are. So this iteration is the U.S. iteration, and I’m super pleased: we have had a lot of applicants, a lot of new people, which is great because what we try to do is to get new faces that maybe wouldn’t have come before. And I think we’ve accomplished that.”