Hal R. Varian, the chief economist at Google, will give the 54th Annual Carl Snyder Memorial Lecture at UC Santa Barbara on Tuesday, April 3. He will speak on "Predicting the Present With Google Trends."
His talk will begin at 6 p.m. in the University Center Corwin Pavilion at UCSB. It is free and open to the public. Seating is limited, however, and reservations are recommended. They may be made by calling the UCSB Department of Economics at (805) 893-3569, or by visiting the department's Web site at http://www.econ.ucsb.edu.
In his talk, Varian will illustrate how Google search data can be used to measure the state of the economy in various sectors, and discuss some of the ramifications for research and policy.
The Carl Snyder Memorial Lecture is named for the noted economic authority and author who died in 1946. Established in 1960 with a bequest from the estate of Snyder's wife, Madeleine Raisch, the memorial is used to bring outstanding lecturers in the field of economics to UCSB.
Varian, who is also an emeritus professor of business, economics, and information management at UC Berkeley, joined Google in 2002 as a consultant and has been involved in many aspects of the company, including auction design, econometric analysis, finance, corporate strategy, and public policy.
A fellow of the Guggenheim Foundation, the Econometric Society, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Varian completed his undergraduate and graduate degrees at M.I.T. and UC Berkeley. He holds honorary doctorates from the University of Oulu in Finland and the University of Karlsruhe in Germany. The author of numerous papers in economic theory, industrial organization, financial economics, econometrics, and information economics, Varian is also the author of two major economics textbooks that have been translated into 22 languages. In addition, he is co-author of the book, "Information Rules: A Strategic Guide to the Network Economy," and wrote a monthly column for the New York Times from 2000 to 2007.
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