Keynote Speakers
Ursula Renold is professor of the Chair of Education Systems at the Deparment of Management, Technology and Economics which is part of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich. In addition, she is Chairman of the University Board of the University of Applied Sciences and Arts, Northwestern Switzerland. She was a visiting fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Education between September 2012 and March 2013.
Prior to this, Renold was Director General of the Federal Office for Professional Education and Technology (OPET) until June 2012. In this position, she headed Switzerland‘s competence center for professional education, the universities of applied sciences, and led program innovation starting in 2005. Before becoming Director General, she was head of OPET’s Vocational Education and Training Division and Director of the Swiss Federal Institute of Vocational Education and Training (teacher education).
During her career, Renold has launched numerous key initiatives that have had great impact on the Vocational and Professional Education and Training system in Switzerland. She holds an honorary professorship in Professional Education at the University of Applied Labor Studies in Mannheim (Germany).
Jochen Kluve is Director of Evaluation at KfW Development Bank and Professor of Economics at the School of Business and Economics, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Previously, he was Head of the Berlin Office and Head of the Labor Markets unit of RWI, an economics think tank, and a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Berkeley. He studied economics in Heidelberg, Dublin and Amsterdam.
His research focuses on empirical labor and development economics, including, inter alia, counterfactual impact evaluations and meta analyses of labor market policies, educational programs and interventions to reduce informality. Jochen has advised and collaborated with, inter alia, the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, the ILO, and the European Commission. His research has been published in World Development, the Economic Journal, Journal of the European Economic Association, and the Journal of Applied Econometrics, among others.
Jamie McCasland is an Assistant Professor in the Vancouver School of Economics at the University of British Columbia. She is a development economist, with overlapping interests in labour economics. Her primary strand of research focuses on the functioning of labour markets and constraints faced by small firms in low- and middle-income countries, utilizing field experiments and original data collection in Ghana. New strands of research study local governments in the US and the relationship between household cognitive load and women's labour market outcomes in Brazil. She holds a PhD in Economics from the University of California, Berkeley and a BA in Economics from UCLA.
Round table panel members
Elisabeth von Capeller
Ingrid Portenkirchner
Ursula Renold