The first speaker for the Special Workshop series, which had been instituted this year, was Professor Keisuke Hirano (University of Arizona), who is the winner of the 2015 Japan Economic Association Nakahara Prize.

It was joint with macroeconomics, econometrics, and applied economics workshop series. The seminar was on estimation and forecasting in regression models when there is uncertainty about the choice of predictor variables, and involved active questions by many participants.