Background, DTMC
Dale T. Mortensen had been coming regularly to AU since 1982. He realized that his models involving individual waiting times and wage dispersion in the labor market could best be tested in the detailed type of register data available in Denmark. From 2006 through 2010, Dale T. Mortensen held a Niels Bohr Professorship at AU, funded by the Danish National Research Foundation, allowing him to spend three months each fall at AU.
In 2010, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics, together with Peter Diamond, MIT, and Christoper Pissarides, London School of Economics, for their analysis of markets with search frictions.
For the period 2010 through 2016, Bent Jesper Christensen (BJC) held a grant Cycles, Adjustment, Policy (CAP) from the Danish Council for Independent Research | Social Sciences and a supplementary grant from rector, AU, that allowed continuing Dale T. Mortensen’s affiliation with AU.
In 2016, BJC was awarded a grant from AU to start the Dale T. Mortensen Center (DTMC) in 2017.
Dale T. Mortensen’s first students were Ken Burdett and John Kennan, in the 1970s at Northwestern. His “adopted students” included George Neumann and Nick Kiefer, who as young assistant professors in the 1970s were interested in his work. All these people, and several of Dale T. Mortensen’s later students, became part of the international research network associated with Dale T. Mortensen and AU. DTMC will build on the experiences so far and continue to carry out new research on markets with search frictions and related areas.
More about Bent Jesper Christensen's connection to Dale T. Mortensen
Bent Jesper Christensen (BJC) did his PhD in Economics from 1986 through 1989 at Cornell University, New York. His professors included Nick Kiefer (econometrics, thesis advisor), Ken Burdett (price theory), Randy Wright (macro), and David Easley (micro, also a Northwestern PhD), all of whom worked on markets with search frictions, and Bob Jarrow (finance).
BJC published papers on markets with search frictions in major international journals including Journal of Labor Economics (JOLE), Journal of Econometrics (JoE), and Econometric Theory (ET) with Nick Kiefer, and on finance in Journal of Financial Economics (JFE).
BJC and Dale T. Mortensen started work on the Danish register data with George Neumann, Axel Werwatz, and Dale T. Mortensen’s student Rasmus Lentz, and their paper was published in JOLE in 2005.
BJC and Nick Kiefer’s 2009 Princeton volume Economic Modeling and Inference covers, among others, markets with search frictions, stochastic dynamic programming, macroeconomics, finance, and relevant econometric methods. It is endorsed by Dale T. Mortensen, Bob Lucas, Tom Sargent, Tim Bollerslev, John Campbell, and others.
During the CAP grant period, BJC and Dale T. Mortensen worked with Jesper Bagger on the Danish register data.
BJC published papers on stochastic dynamic programming, macro, and finance with Martin Andreasen, Olaf Posch, and Michel van der Wel in Journal of Econometrics in 2015 and 2016.
He is working on a stochastic dynamic programming model with John Kennan and Malene Kallestrup-Lamb and on another book with Nick Kiefer.
Rasmus Lentz and Randy Wright are regularly teaching PhD courses on markets with search frictions at AU, and together with Ken Burdett, John Kennan, Nick Kiefer, and many others, they remain part of the international research network associated with Dale T. Mortensen and AU.
Jesper Bagger and Rasmus Lentz are affiliated with DTMC as international fellows.
DTMC will build on the experiences so far and continue to carry out new research on markets with search frictions and related areas.
