President's Column
September 2024
In my first presidential column, I thought I would spend some time talking about how we choose our meeting locations. In my time serving on the board, I've participated in many discussions about where the AAEA should hold our Annual Meetings. An important thing to realize is that our meetings are booked 5-years out. Last year, we signed a contract with the Marriott Marquis in Washington D.C. for our 2029 (Washington, DC) and are sending out the RFP for the 2030 meetings this week. This long planning horizon makes it challenging to make changes in the short run.
So, how does the Board go about choosing a location for the meetings? The first step is when the AAEA staff send out a request for bids to cities across the country. Unfortunately, the size of our meetings rules out many seemingly plausible locations. AAEA meetings are large enough that many sites don't have convention hotels with enough meeting rooms to accommodate the large number of simultaneous sessions we need (a minimum of 30, a 10,000 square foot plenary room, and a 10,000 square foot Poster Hall). While splitting the conference across multiple hotels is something we have done in the past, and are open to considering in the future, this typically comes at a higher price. The same also holds true for meetings centered around a convention center.
Based on bids received, the Board draws up a shortlist. For the last few years, a key objective in choosing the shortlist has been an effort to minimize the total cost of attending the meetings––this is why we end up in New Orleans in July. The total cost of the meetings is more than just the hotel rooms, the minimum number of rooms, the minimum amounts we need to spend on food and beverages, or the cost of Audio/Visual support. We also consider factors such as airfare and location of the hotel in a city (and distance from the airport). Some cities with reasonable hotel prices can be very expensive to fly into. Membership has expressed clear preferences for conference hotels in walkable areas, where grabbing a meal with friends does not require an Uber ride. AAEA staff will then conduct a site visit to assess the hotel in person and evaluate factors like the neighborhood around the hotel and flow of space in the hotel.
There is also a rough sense of trying to balance geographic representation. Next (2025) year we are headed west to Denver, CO (2025), then to the Midwest in Kansas City, MO (2026), onto Philadelphia, PA (2027) in the east, and then we’ll head down south to San Antonio, TX (2028). Finally, we try to meet in Washington D.C. (and will in 2029) about every five years (more or less), where we can engage with the diverse policy community who might choose to attend the meetings every year. We also consider factors such as visa requirements for our international graduate students. AAEA has held successful conferences in Canada in the past, however travel costs and increasingly stringent visa requirements make this a less attractive option at present. Based on all of these factors, the board discusses the options and then votes. In my experience, the board overwhelmingly supports one option.
Moving forward, we have pushed to expand the cities we consider in an effort to bring down costs. So-called "second-tier" cities can offer attractive and cost-effective options. We will also probably be less likely to meet on the West Coast, where only a couple of cities meet our criteria and flights are more expensive for many of our members.