American Economic Association Research Articles

The effect of an affordable daycare program on health and economic well-being in Rajasthan, India: protocol for a cluster-randomized impact evaluation study.

BackgroundThe provision of affordable and reliable daycare services is a potentially important policy lever for empowering Indian women. Access to daycare might reduce barriers to labor force entry and generate economic opportunities for women, improve education for girls caring for younger siblings, and promote nutrition and learning among children. However, empirical evidence concerning the effects of daycare programs in low-and-middle-income countries is scarce. This cluster-randomized trial will estimate the effect of a community-based daycare program on health and economic well-being over the life-course among women and children living in rural Rajasthan, India.MethodsThis three-year study takes place in rural communities from five blocks in the Udaipur District of rural Rajasthan. The intervention is the introduction of a full-time, affordable, community-based daycare program. At baseline, 3177 mothers with age eligible children living in 160 village hamlets were surveyed. After the baseline, these hamlets were randomized to the intervention or control groups and respondents will be interviewed on two more occasions. Primary social and economic outcomes include women’s economic status and economic opportunity, women’s empowerment, and children’s educational attainment. Primary health outcomes include women’s mental health, as well as children’s nutritional status.DiscussionThis interdisciplinary research initiative will provide rigorous evidence concerning the effects of daycare in lower-income settings. In doing so it will address an important research gap and has the potential to inform policies for improving the daycare system in India in ways that promote health and economic well-being.Trial registration(1) The ISRCTN clinical trial registry (ISRCTN45369145), http://www.isrctn.com/ISRCTN45369145, registered on May 16, 2016 and (2) The American Economic Association’s registry for randomized controlled trials (AEARCTR-0000774), http://www.socialscienceregistry.org/trials/774, registered on July 15, 2015

Can a summer make a difference? The impact of the American Economic Association Summer Program on minority student outcomes

In the 1970s, the American Economic Association (AEA) was one of several professional associations to launch a summer program with the goal of increasing racial and ethnic diversity in its profession. In this paper we estimate the effectiveness of the AEA's program which, to the best of our knowledge, is the first to rigorously study such a summer program. Using a comparison group consisting of those who applied to, but did not attend, the program and controlling for an array of background characteristics, we find that program participants were over 40 percentage points more likely to apply to and attend a Ph.D. program in economics, 26 percentage points more likely to complete a Ph.D., and about 15 percentage points more likely to ever work in an economics-related academic job. Using our estimates, we calculate that the program may directly account for 17–21 percent of the Ph.D.s awarded to minorities in economics over the past 20 years.

Inside the Organizational Institutions of Institutional Economics: Why Are There Two Institutionalist Associations?

:The institutionalist-inspired Association for Evolutionary Economics (AFEE), officially founded in 1965, was the first heterodox association to break with the American Economic Association (AEA). In 1979, another institutionalist association, the Association for Institutional Thought (AFIT), was founded. Using mainly archival evidence, this paper provides historical reasons for the presence of two institutionalist associations.

Resources and Economic Growth

Editor’s Introduction Originally published in Volume 22, Number 2, Fall 1978, pages 5-11. Robert Solow (born 1924) is one of the most honored economists of all time. In 1961 he received the John Bates Clark medal given by the American Economic Association for significant contributions to the field by an American economist under the age of forty. Several Clark medal recipients have gone on to win the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, including Professor Solow in 1987 for his work in economic growth. His work was again honored in 2014 when he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award presented by the United States. The Solow Growth Model, originally developed in the 1950s, is one of the most widely applied theories in modern economics. In this paper, Professor Solow examines how future economic growth and development is constrained if the natural resource base narrows over time. Professor Solow then applies a variant of his eponymous growth model to analyze the relationship between the ratio of nonrenewable resource inputs to GNP in the United States over the middle half of the twentieth century.

Reflections On Economic Development

Editor’s Introduction Originally published in Volume 10, Number 1, Spring 1966, pages 5-13. Three years after the merger that created Omicron Delta Epsilon, Evsey Domar (1914-1997) became one of the first established “big names” to publish a paper in The American Economist. The occasion was precipitated by the inaugural delivery of the John R. Commons Lecture at the annual American Economic Association conference the previous December. ODE presents the Commons Award biennially to an outstanding economist in recognition of academic achievements and for service to the economics profession. The award memorializes Professor Commons who founded one of ODE’s predecessor honor societies in 1915 at the University of Wisconsin. Professor Domar, immortalized as one of the originators of the Harrod-Domar model of economic growth, was the first in a long and continuing line of prominent economists to receive the Commons Award, including Milton Friedman, Kenneth Arrow, Douglas North, Gary Becker, and Peter Diamond. In this paper, Professor Domar outlines his thoughts and ideas on why and how underdeveloped countries should institute market-oriented reforms to promote economic growth and prosperity. Fifty years later his words still ring true, “Economic development is a difficult and complex process, hard to deal with, because contrary to some of our favorite models, it is essentially not a capital but a human problem.”

Finance and Development March 2016

This article profiles economist David Card, whose work on minimum wages, immigration, and education challenged conventional wisdom. Card rose to prominence in 1995 when he won the coveted John Bates Clark Medal, then awarded every two years by the American Economic Association to the leading economist under the age of 40 who is working in the United States. It is considered the top award in economics barring the Nobel Prize. Through empirical research into a series of “natural experiments”—real-life situations underpinned by robust data—Card challenged conventional economic thinking in several important areas. He found that, unlike in classical models, raising the minimum wage does not necessarily increase unemployment, and even has the potential to reduce it. More than 15 years of research led to a landmark 1993 paper and subsequent book—coauthored with Princeton professor Alan B. Krueger—that analyzed the impact of the minimum wage on the New Jersey fast-food industry.

Monetary Trends in the United States and the United Kingdom

Editor’s Introduction Originally published in Volume 16, Number 1, Spring 1972, pages 4-17. At the 1971 annual conference of the American Economic Association, Milton Friedman (1912-2006) delivered this paper as the fourth John R. Commons Lecture. It is a summary of research he was conducting with Anna Schwartz intended as a follow-up to their seminal work published nearly a decade earlier, A Monetary History of the United States, 1867-1960. Over his lengthy career, Professor Friedman became his generation’s leading proponent of the Chicago School of economic thought and the founder of modern monetarism. In 1976 he received the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, “for his achievements in the fields of consumption analysis, monetary history and theory and for his demonstration of the complexity of stabilization policy.” Professor Friedman was one of those rare economists whose work was as widely known by the general public as it was respected by his academic peers. In this paper, Friedman identifies, examines, and compares a variety of trends in the monetary bases of the United States and the United Kingdom using nearly a century of data. His observations on the impact of technology, such as “automatic computers” on the velocity of money and the early movements toward a “checkless society” are prescient given that they were written more than forty years before today’s age of digital commerce. The paper concludes with a transcription of Professor Friedman’s responses to questions from the lecture’s audience.

A NEGLECTED INCONSISTENCY IN MILTON FRIEDMAN’S AEA PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS

Milton Friedman (1968)—his famous Presidential Address to the American Economic Association—contains an elementary error right at the heart of what is usually supposed to be the paper’s crucial argument. That is the argument to the effect that during an inflation, changing expectations shift the Phillips curve. It is suggested that the fact of this mistake and of its having gone all but unnoticed are points of historical interest. Further reflections, drawing on the arguments of Forder (2014), Macroeconomics and the Phillips Curve Myth, are suggested.

What Was the Message of Friedman's Presidential Address to the American Economic Association?

It is widely accepted that the importance of Friedman’s Presidential Address to the American Economic Association lies in its criticism of policy based on the Phillips curve. It is argued that a reading of the text does not support such a view, and this and other considerations suggest that any such aim was far from Friedman’s mind in 1968. His objective was the quite different one of making a case for policy ‘rules’ rather than discretion.

The New Stock Market: Sense and Nonsense

How stocks are traded in the United States has been totally transformed. Gone are the dealers on NASDAQ and the specialists at the NYSE. Instead, a company’s stock can now be traded on up to sixty competing venues where a computer matches incoming orders. High-frequency traders (HFTs) post the majority of quotes and are the preponderant source of liquidity in the new market. Many practices associated with the new stock market are highly controversial, as illustrated by the public furor following the publication of Michael Lewis’s book Flash Boys. Critics say that HFTs use their speed in discovering changes in the market and in altering their orders to take advantage of other traders. Dark pools— off-exchange trading venues that promise to keep the orders sent to them secret and to restrict the parties allowed to trade—are accused of operating in ways that injure many traders. Brokers are said to Copyright © 2015 Merritt B. Fox, Lawrence R. Glosten, and Gabriel V. Rauterberg. † Michael E. Patterson Professor of Law, NASDAQ Professor for the Law and Economics of Capital Markets, Columbia Law School. †† S. Sloan Colt Professor of Banking and International Finance, Columbia Business School. ††† Post-Doctoral Research Scholar in the Law and Economics of Capital Markets, Columbia Law School and Columbia Business School; Yale Law School, J.D. 2009. For particularly helpful comments, we are grateful to Daniel Aisen, Kevin Haeberle, Bill Harts, Joseph McCahery, Laura Miller, Joshua Mitts, and participants at the American Law and Economics Association 2015 Annual Meeting, the European University Institute Law Faculty Seminar, the FGV Direito Rio Conference, the City Bar Association, the Massey Prize Symposium, the May 2015 workshop of the Law and Economics of Capital Markets Program, and a 2014 Columbia Law School Faculty Workshop. FOX IN PRINTER FINAL (DO NOT DELETE) 11/2/2015 1:17 PM 192 DUKE LAW JOURNAL [Vol. 65:191 mishandle customer orders in an effort to maximize the payments they receive for sending trading venues their customers’ orders, rather than delivering best execution. In this Article, we set out a simple, but powerful, conceptual framework for analyzing the new stock market. The framework is built upon three basic concepts: adverse selection, the principal-agent problem, and a multivenue trading system. We illustrate the utility of this framework by analyzing the new market’s eight most controversial practices. The effects of each practice are evaluated in terms of the multiple social goals served by equity-trading markets. We ultimately conclude that there is no emergency requiring immediate, poorly considered action. Some reforms proposed by critics, however, are clearly desirable. Other proposed reforms involve a trade-off between two or more valuable social goals. In these cases, whether a reform is desirable may be unclear, but a better understanding of the trade-off involved enables a more informed choice and suggests areas in which further empirical research would be useful. Finally, still other proposed reforms are based on misunderstandings of the market or of the social impacts of a practice and should be avoided.

Do Activist Investors Constrain Managerial Moral Hazard in Chapter 11?: Evidence from Junior Activist Investing

This article examines the hedge fund investment strategy of buying junior claims of Chapter 11 debtors and playing an activist role in the bankruptcy process. These hedge funds are often accused of rent-seeking by managers. I use a new methodology to conduct the first empirical study of this investment strategy. I find little evidence that junior activists abuse the bankruptcy process to extract hold-up value. Instead, the results suggest that they constrain managerial self-dealing and promote the bankruptcy policy goals of maximizing creditor recoveries and distributing the firm’s value in accordance with the absolute priority rule. (JEL codes: G23, G30, G33). Hedge funds that specialize in distressed investing have grown to manage more than $140 billion in assets, up from $4 billion in 2000. Some of these hedge funds are activist investors that try to influence the restructuring of distressed firms. One of the most common activist investing strategies is to buy junior claims—such as unsecured debt or equity—and participate in the Chapter 11 * University of California, Hastings College of Law; Stanford Law School. E-mail: elliasjared@uchastings.edu. I thank Barry E. Adler, Kenneth Ayotte, Douglas G. Baird, G. Marcus Cole, John Crawford, Victor P. Goldberg, Michael Klausner, Edward R. Morrison, Menesh Patel, Elizabeth Pollman, Mitch Polinsky, Nancy B. Rapoport, Robert K. Rasmussen, David A. Skeel, David C. Smith, Robert J. Stark, and George T. Triantis and two anonymous referees for their helpful comments. I also thank conference audiences at the Annual Meeting of the American Law and Economics Association, the National Business Law Scholars Conference, the Conference on Empirical Legal Studies, the UC Berkeley/USD Business Law Conference as well as workshop audiences at the Stanford Law School Fellows Workshop, the Stanford Law and Economics Workshop and faculty seminars at Tulane, Cardozo, UC Hastings, Fordham, Michigan, Virginia and Duke. I thank Stanford Law School for its generous financial support of this project. 1 See BarclayHedge Alternative Investment Database. http://www.barclayhedge.com/. While there are other types of activist distressed investors, hedge funds are the most prominent. The Author 2015. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The John M. Olin Center for Law, Economics and Business at Harvard Law School. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. For commercial re-use, please contact journals.permissions@oup.com doi:10.1093/jla/lav010 Journal of Legal Analysis Advance Access published September 13, 2015

Editors’ Summary

Editors’ Summary Raquel Bernal, Marcela Eslava, Ugo Panizza, and Roberto Rigobón This volume of Economía includes six papers. Among them, we are proud to publish the Carlos F. Díaz-Alejandro lecture delivered by Carmen M. Reinhart at the 2014 Annual Meeting of the Latin American and Caribbean Economic Association (LACEA), on the current validity of Díaz-Alejandro’s insights regarding the recurring features of financial crises. By granting Carmen Reinhart the Díaz-Alejandro award, LACEA recognizes her outstanding contributions to the profession. Three of the other papers in this issue cover topics of particular importance to Latin American labor markets: formal and informal labor market institutions versus macroeconomic outcomes and volatility; the trends in successful graduation rates in the region; and the microeconomic determinants of out-of-school, out-of-work status for youth in eighteen Latin American countries. The final two papers in this volume investigate important topics on institutions and political economy in the region: whether financial crisis leads to fiscal reform; and whether drug-related violence is related to the trafficking or possession of drugs, with implications for the expected effect of potential drug legalization. In “Out-of-School and Out-of-Work Youth in Latin America: A Persistent Problem in a Decade of Prosperity,” Mauricio Cárdenas, Rafael de Hoyos, and Miguel Székely explore the evolution and microeconomic determinants of the out-of-school, out-of-work (OSOW) status among Latin American youngsters. Using household surveys data for eighteen Latin American countries, they show that the recent prosperity in the region has had a smaller impact on the OSOW population than on other pressing economic problems. For instance, while the fraction of the population that is poor has fallen by over eight percentage points, the fraction of youth that are OSOW has only fallen by two percentage points. The authors also find that the probability of being OSOW for a young person is negatively correlated with household income, with the level of education of the household head, and with the probability that the household head is employed. [End Page vii] Common wisdom holds that crises are unique opportunities for reform, with fiscal reforms being frequently advocated in times of crisis. Mark Hallerberg and Carlos Scartascini explore the empirical link between crises and fiscal reforms in “When Do Governments Improve Fiscal Institutions? Lessons from Financial Crisis and Fiscal Reform in Latin America.” They find that in Latin America, the relationship has not been independent of the type of crisis. While fiscal crises have indeed led to fiscal reforms, the same cannot be said about banking crises. In fact, a banking crisis alone makes fiscal tightening less likely. In “Institutions, Informal Labor Markets, and Business Cycle Volatility,” Alan Finkelstein Shapiro studies the relationship between different institutions that affect informality and long-run macroeconomic outcomes, as well as labor market volatility. Using a business cycle model with search and matching in the labor market, he shows that different policies intended to reduce informality have different effects on overall economic activity and unemployment volatility, even if their effect on informality is the same. He contrasts the effects of increases in penalties on informal employment with the effects of improvements in the business environment for formal firms, in magnitudes that imply the same reduction in informality. He finds that while increasing penalties to informal employment reduces economic activity and unemployment volatility, the opposite is true for improvements in the quality of institutions that regulate the formal sector. “Enrollment, Graduation, and Dropout Rates in Latin America: Is the Glass Half Empty or Half Full?,” by Marina Bassi, Matias Busso, and Juan Sebastián Muñoz, documents the evolution of secondary school enrollment and graduation in eighteen Latin American countries between 1990 and 2010, using household surveys. They show that although enrollment and graduation rates increased during that period while dropout rates decreased, much progress is still to be achieved. Graduation rates remain low, and there is great inequality across income levels, genders, and regions. In the period, enrollment rates increased from 44 to 58 percent; graduation rates increased from 31 to 45 percent. These figures are still far from the numbers around 90 percent that the...

The Educational Value of the College Fed Challenge Competition

The College Fed Challenge is a competition between undergraduate students from different colleges and universities. It is designed to enhance the development of research, critical thinking, and presentation skills. This paper analyzes the value of the competition as an instrument for improving undergraduate economics education. We argue that the College Fed Challenge incorporates many of the recommendations in Educating Economists: The Teagle Discussion on Re-Evaluating the Undergraduate Economics Major (2009). We present results from surveys of (a) students from schools that participated in regional competitions in 2010 and in 2011 and (b) graduates from the University of Delaware who participated in past years. A focus of the surveys was to determine whether participation improved the skills described by Hansen. The results reflect the impressive effect on student learning outcomes. We conclude that the visibility of the College Fed Challenge can be an important factor in determining its impact. If the competition were national in scope, if the judges were carefully selected so that success in the competition were more meaningful, and if the American Economic Association were to provide stronger support, then the competition could conceivably have a significant and positive impact on economics education in the United States.

Matthew Gentzkow, Winner of the 2014 Clark Medal

The 2014 John Bates Clark Medal of the American Economic Association was awarded to Matthew Gentzkow of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. The citation recognized Matt's “fundamental contributions to our understanding of the economic forces driving the creation of media products, the changing nature and role of media in the digital environment, and the effect of media on education and civic engagement.” In addition to his work on the media, Matt has made a number of significant contributions to empirical industrial organization more broadly, as well as to applied economic theory. In this essay, I highlight some of these contributions.

Mit’s Rise to Prominence: Outline of a Collective Biography

The core question of the MIT economics department’s history—why has MIT economics risen to prominence so quickly?—requires an approach to the history of economics that focuses on the role of the networks within which economists operate and how their ideas diffuse and gain scientific credit. By reconstructing the network of MIT economics PhDs and their advisers, this article furnishes evidence of how MIT rose to prominence as documented by the numerous ties of Nobel laureates, Clark medalists, elected officials of the American Economic Association or the Council of Economic Advisers to the MIT network. It also reveals the MIT economics department as a community of self-replicating economists who are largely trained by a few key advisers who were mostly trained at MIT as well. MIT has a disproportionate share of graduates who remain in American academe, which may be an important factor in MIT’s rise to prominence. On a methodological level this article introduces collective biography, or prosopography, a well-established historiographical method, to the field of the history of economics.

When Talk Isn't Cheap: The Corporate Value of Political Rhetoric

Does political rhetoric matter for firms and investors? We conduct a textual analysis of all 388 gubernatorial “State of the state” speeches given between 2002 and 2010 across U.S. states, to examine this question. Political speeches may reduce policy uncertainty (Pastor and Veronesi, 2012), reflect the politician’s views regarding the economic future of the state, and contain new information regarding future policies that affect the business environment. Using data on 5,721 firms matched based on their location of their headquarters and main operations, we conduct an event study examining the market reaction to the tone of the State of the state addresses. To examine whether the information has a long-run impact on firms, we also consider changes in firms’ investment and employment decisions. Controlling for speech length, firm, and state-level characteristics, the results show a statistically significant and positive association between the level of optimism expressed in a Governor’s speech, and the abnormal returns of firms headquartered in that Governor’s state. We also find that a more optimistic speech is associated with a statistically significant increase in investment and employment, relative to firm size, whereas a more pessimistic speech is associated with a decline in investment and employment for firms located in that state. To identify the impact of the speech on firms, we show that the results are robust to identifying the geographic focus of firms’ operations, using a matched sample of firms located in neighboring states as a control group, and instrumental variables. To identify channels by which the content of the speech may have an impact, we show that firms that obtain state-government contracts, and those that are more dependent on skilled human capital and therefore education spending, significantly increase investments if the budget-related and education-related parts of the speech are more optimistic. We also find that political rhetoric is most informative during uncertain economic conditions, when government policy has had a greater impact. Lastly, we show that institutional characteristics, such as term limits and state-level transparency, affect the response of firms to the speech. * Art Durnev is at the Henry B. Tippie College of Business, University of Iowa, artem-durnev@uiowa.edu; Larry Fauver is at the University of Tennessee, lafauver@utk.edu, and Nandini Gupta is at the Kelley School of Business, Indiana University, nagupta@indiana.edu. We thank participants in the finance department seminars at Indiana and Iowa, IU Maurer School of Law, 2013 CICF Conference, Shanghai, 2013 CAF Conference at Indian School of Business, and the American Economic Association 2014 meetings.

Of Tastes and Values

This lecture was delivered by Judge Calabresi upon receiving the Ronald H. Coase Medal at the Annual Meeting of the American Law and Economic Association at Stanford Law School on May 18, 2012. The content is part of his forthcoming book on The Future of Law and Economics.

A 19th Century Data Goldmine for Legal Scholars

Nineteenth century empirical legal studies, certainly those with an economic, social, political or historical element, are unlikely to be wholly satisfactory to the lawyers, scholars or academics who conduct such work. Necessary data is frequently unavailable, imprecise, excessively aggregated, not uniform across space and time, and collected by unprofessional or at least procedurally inconsistent agents. We have discovered and begun to use a little known gold mine of data, uniform across the United States, recorded every two years and, in some cases, available for other developed nations. We have been reporting the existence of this treasure trove and conducting sample studies using it, and have presented our findings at meetings conducted by the Smithsonian Institution, the American Economic Association, the Canadian Economic Association and other scholarly gatherings. Legal scholars who believe in the importance of hard numbers describing economic, social and even political information will be interested in our collected material and studies. The data gold mine consists of several separate deposits. The first is the U.S. Official Register (OR), a rare set of documents. The Library of Congress has a complete set and there may be enough surviving volumes scattered around the country in research libraries and specialists' collections to create a few more sets. The Official Register was first published in 1816, then biannually in odd-numbered years, the title changed several times, and responsibility for publication moved between several government agencies. Recorded in the OR is data describing the birthplace, name, occupation and then current workplace of every person receiving a salary-type payment from the U.S. Federal Government. Most importantly, postmasters' salaries in the OR were a direct function of the amount of business in each individual post office. Thus this salary data provides an excellent proxy for local business activity every two years for every town and village in the United States and territories.The second important data source is the annual reports of the Postmaster General (AR), along with similar materials from other countries, Canada in particular. In a previous essay, we showed how the AR's data on postal money orders flowing into and out of former Confederate States versus the Union States flows in Post Civil War America can be used to measure the rate at which the nation recovered to a healthier "balance of interstate payments" between 1865 and 1890. Constitutional experts might find such information useful in tracing the impact of the post-Civil-war amendments. Since AR data is broken down by states, and available annually, we claim the AR-derived “business cycle” data is better than the competition’s.Postmaster cash books are a third data source. The OR and AR are national in scope, report at the micro level, adhere to a uniform standard and appear annually (AR) or biannually (OR). Cash books are valuable and interesting, but “opportunistic”, rare, and not national. The Post Office Department issued ledger type cash books to postmasters. In these, the postmaster kept records of the number and value of each individual money order sold and cashed at his post office. Some books also required the listing of the post office at which a money order sold was to be cashed. The actual books were not intended to be kept after the required monthly or quarterly reports that were submitted to the Post Office Department. Thus, they were usually destroyed so existing copies are rare and so do not provide a national view of money order business. However, those that do exist provide extremely detailed data on the day to day activity at individual post offices. Ledgers that detail the destination of issued money orders will reveal not only seasonal patterns in monetary flow, but whether the value of the issued money orders was a function of local or otherwise special changes in the legal, constitutional or juridical environment of the postal district.Up until now, this potential gold mine of economic, social, political and historical information has been unavailable to the scholarly community, due to the rarity of the documents themselves, the format of the reporting and, most of all, the absence of any fully searchable digitized version of the material. Moreover, no focused, professional effort has been devoted to bring the data to life. We are correcting that with the use of optical character recognition and other procedures. Our project will discuss these data sources in detail, present some small studies of our own, and assist other scholars who may have an interest in the use of this unique information to advance empirical legal studies.

Farewell to Notes

The great composer Johannes Brahms once remarked: is not difficult to compose; but it is incredibly difficult to let the superfluous notes drop under the table (as quoted in Musgrave and Pascall 1987, p. 138). Here at the Journal of Economic Perspectives, the challenges of composing each issue remain, but the have become superfluous, at least in their paper version. The Notes, as those who lurk in these back pages of JEP know well, announce forthcoming conferences, calls for papers, awards, and the like. However, the Internet has made it obsolete to deliver such information on paper in a quarterly journal. News and Notes from the American Economic Association is at http://www .aeaweb.org/news.php; outside announcements are on the Bulletin Board website at http://www.aeaweb.org/bulletinboard.php; and for a complete list of economics conferences by field area, see http://www.aeaweb.org/RFE/conferences.php. But as we say farewell to the print version of the Notes, a moment of remem brance seems appropriate. The first issue of the American Economic Review, published in 1911, found it worthwhile to devote 13 out of 219 total pages to Notes. The first (freely available online at http://www.jstor.org) was a mixed bag. It started with news on the growth of AEA membership, followed with an announcement more than a page long about the opening of a Bureau of Railway Economics in Washington, DC. The US Bureau of Labor announced a number of jobs for trained economists. There was progress on the formation of Economic Clubs in various cities under the guidance of the National Economic League, and the Tulane Society of Economics continued to hold monthly meetings.

American Economic Association Committee on Statistics

American Economic Association Committee on Statistics