For each activity under the auspices of LAEF, we aim to maintain a clear focus on a particular question or anomaly or puzzle. That is what will produce new findings and clarify where the profession stands on the respective issues. The activities may include:

• Workshops in which about ten scholars from anywhere in the world spend one-to-two weeks. During that period, the participants make occasional presentations, but the focus will be on working on aspects of the issue at hand while in residence.
• Extremely focused two-to-three-day conferences with five or six presentations per day. The number of outside participants may be 15-20.
• An environment in which two or three researchers (one of whom could be from UCSB) get together for about a month or more (in some cases, possibly as part of a sabbatical) to work on a particular question or issue.
• Postdocs (and, under some circumstances, possibly even predocs) spending time at LAEF.
• Making modern research findings and approaches accessible in the class room, especially at undergraduate and master’s levels. Such efforts may build upon the progress already made in co-operation with the Department of Information Science and Media Studies at the University of Bergen. So far, they fully support a closed-economy real-business-cycle model, with ability for students to produce tables of business-cycle statistics for data and model, along with plots of impulse responses. On a more limited basis, they also support an open-economy model, which adds focus on aggregates such as the terms of trade and the trade balance.