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Commercial paper is a short-term debt instrument issued by large corporations. The commercial paper market has long been viewed as a bastion of high liquidity and low risk. But twice during the financial crisis of 2007–2009, the commercial paper market nearly dried up and ceased being perceived as a safe haven. Major interventions by the Federal Reserve, including large outright purchases of commercial paper, were eventually used to support both issuers of and investors in commercial paper. We will offer an analysis of the commercial paper market during the financial crisis. First, we describe the institutional background of the commercial paper market. Second, we analyze the supply and demand sides of the market. Third, we examine the most important developments during the crisis of 2007–2009. Last, we discuss three explanations of the decline in the commercial paper market: substitution to alternative sources of financing by commercial paper issuers, adverse selection, and institutional constraints among money market funds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the impact of pre-analysis plans on the publication of economics research, based on the analysis of papers from the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) in the U.S. Topics discussed include the broader adoption of pre-analysis plans and its impact on research credibility, publication result of NBER research work with and without pre-analysis plans, and the generation of citations in studies with pre-analysis plans.

Examines the publishing trends in eight leading economic journals in the United States. Multi-authorship over time; Potential reasons for the rising trend in multi-authorship.

Farley W. Grubb's recent papers on the early U.S. monetary system would be important contributions to the common currency area literature were not most of their historical assertions questionable and their key assumption--that the medium of exchange can be inferred from the unit of account--dubious. We contend that after 1781 most Americans eschewed government paper money in favor of fullbodied coins and convertible bank liabilities and that, contrary to Grubb's claim, bankers did not foist the constitutional clause banning state emissions onto an unsuspecting public. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The desirability of politically creating currency unions among otherwise sovereign states is an ongoing debate. The benefits of the U.S. currency union and the benefits of other politically manufactured currency unions are assumed to be obvious, namely a reduction in monetary instability and exchange rate transaction costs within the union thereby stimulating long-run economic growth. Price indices, exchange rates and market-generated transaction data from 1748 through 1811 are used to determine when the market moved from state currencies to the U.S. dollar and to assess the non-wartime performance of prices, exchange rates, and purchasing power parity before versus this transition. The British North American colonies were the first modern western economies to experiment with large-scale government issuance of flat paper money. Colonial legislatures backed their paper money by linking it not to specie but to future taxes and mortgage payments designed to withdraw it from circulation in a timely fashion. The only continuous data for evaluating colonial/state monetary performance are price indices. Stability of prices is the hallmark of a well-managed monetary regime. New issues of state currency were constitutionally prohibited after 1787 and enough old state currency would be taken out of circulation through tax redemption by the early 1790s that the paper-money medium fell to banknotes by default.

The article presents minutes of the annual business meeting held by the American Economic Association at the Grand Ballroom of the Marriott Marquis in San Diego, California on January 3, 2020. Topics discussed include projected operating loss for 2019 and proposed budget for 2020 by Secretary and Treasurer Peter Rousseau, initiatives taken by the AEA to improve professionalism in economics, and the expansion of papers published in the "American Economic Journal: Policy."

The article offers information on the Annual Meeting of the American Economic Association to be held in Denver, Colorado from January 7-9, 2011, the American Economic Association Continuing Education Program to be held January 9-11, 2011 in Denver, Colorado and a call for papers for the 2012 Annual Meeting of the American Economic Association.

This section presents a call for papers significant to the field of economics in the U.S., as of August 2004.

Unlike scholars in many other disciplines, economists show little organized concern for preserving disciplinary archives. Consider the contrast between the community of mathematicians and the community of economists: the American Mathematical Society and the Mathematical Association of America have embarked on a joint project to preserve official archives and to advise individuals and groups about the preservation of personal and organization-related papers: these two large organizations have recognized that mathematicians' "personal papers and the records of mathematical institutions and organizations are a source for an understanding of history." Generally, donors are asked to sign an agreement that gives property of the papers to the repository; rarely do repositories accept collections on loan or deposit. Before signing such an agreement, one should become familiar with the repository's policies on availability and publication of the papers. Most repositories are willing to attempt to address any concerns one may have, such as a desire to restrict part of the collection to protect the privacy of others.

The article offers information on the economics journal "American Economic Review: Insights" which was launched, with co-editors Pete Klenow and Larry Samuelson, by the American Economic Association on December 1, 2017. Topics discussed include publication of both theory and empirical manuscripts covering fields including behavioral economics, business cycles, and finance, changes to the submission guidelines, and the general nature of editorial process.

This paper draws on international evidence on medical spending to examine what the United States can learn about making its healthcare system more efficient. We focus primarily on understanding contemporaneous differences in the level of spending, generally from the 2000s. Medical spending differs across countries either because the price of services differs (for example, a coronary bypass surgery operation may cost more in the United States than in other countries) or because people receive more services in some countries than in others (for example, more bypass surgery operations). Within the price category, there are two further issues: whether factors earn different returns across countries and whether more clinical or administrative personnel are required to deliver the same care in different countries. We first present the results of a decomposition of healthcare spending along these lines in the United States and in Canada. We then delve into each component in more detail--administrative costs, factor prices, and the provision of care received--bringing in a broader range of international evidence when possible. Finally, we touch upon the organization of primary and chronic disease care and discuss possible gains in that area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on papers discussed at the round table meeting on "the teaching of elementary economics" on December 30, 1949, at New York. Since the movement toward a general course in the social sciences seems to one essential it would be useful at this stage to collate the experiences of the hundred institutions now engaged in offering such a course. Fortunately both the American Economic Association and the American Political Science Association are engaged in a survey of this field by questionnaire and interviews. It is already clear, however, that the general course can be expected to follow no set formula. Its content and emphasis will vary from college to college with the abilities, interests, and philosophies of the staff members, and with the financial resources of the institution. One do not consider such diversity unfortunate. It is fragmentation and compartmentalization which are making the teaching of the social sciences increasingly ineffective in the light of social integration today. The closest integration will continue to recognize the infinite diversity contained in the fundamental unity of society.

This article presents the author's view on George Stigler's paper debunking the effects of economic conditions on electoral results in the United States. I view Stigler's paper as a healthy antidote to conventional wisdom and a refreshing contrast to the frequent practice of computer-users of running regressions until they find something significant. Nonetheless, I believe there is more to the relation between voting behavior and general economic conditions than meets the jaundiced eye, and I am particularly concerned that Stigler's criticisms should be correctly interpreted as dropping the gauntlet--and not a wet blanket--on research in this area. I do not share his negative presumptions about the satisficing model in general or its applicability to voting behavior in particular. To use his example of a 3 percentage point increase in the unemployment rate, it tells us far more than the extra number of people unemployed at a moment of time. It also means that an extra 12 percent of all adult male workers will have experienced some costly spell of unemployment within the preceding year. Without a reliable theoretical guide, the specification of favorable economic conditions becomes a matter of hunch and taste. In the final section of his paper, Stigler sets forth as an alternative a long-memory model of how macroeconomic performance might influence voters. Unlike the Kramer satisficing voter who sees the two parties only as ins and outs, the Stigler long-memory voter has a definite perception of Republicans and Democrats.

The article discusses researches conducted by economists Paul A. David, Warren J. Scoville and Earl J. Hamilton. Researcher Stanley Engerman in his discussion on David's article suggests that his article represents the most thorough study in the debate concerning American economic growth between 1800 and 1840. It is based both on new time series not previously utilized and upon the resourceful application of available data to clarify certain key points. Another researcher Ross M. Robertson while discussing Scoville's article finds his article on the whole persuasive. Robertson certainly has no quarrel with his quantitative inferences, nor for that matter with his description of French governmental regulation in the eighteenth century. He was not altogether convinced of the direct correlation between the paper industry's expansion and the relaxation of direct governmental controls that Scoville alleges. Perhaps Scoville's more extended publications on this subject will elucidate this relationship.

Presents various econometric models of different countries. Problem of stabilization policy in underdeveloped countries; Productivity and comparative costs of Great Britain and the U.S. in international trade.

This article examines the practice of the federal reserve banks in requiring eligible or near-eligible paper as so-called "marginal" or "additional collateral," to paper discounted by them, in contradistinction to advances on member bank' notes payable collateraled by United States securities or eligible paper. As a setting for collateraled discounts, the history and purposes of collateraled advances are stated, as well as the reasons for the ascendancy of such advances over discount. In their publications the federal reserve authorities fail to acknowledge any difference between (1) rediscounting and (2) allowing advances against eligible paper pledged; nor do they report separately the absolute or relative amount of discounts to which "additional collateral" is required, nor the "margin" required, nor the number of members putting up such margins, nor any other data relative thereto. There are no provisions in the Federal Reserve act or regulations for the practice; and yet it is no mean method of credit control. The reasons offered by the reserve banks for the practice are: (1) to repress excessive borrowing by the applicant member, in the Interest of the reserve bank, of the applicant member, or of the system as a whole, using this device as a supplement to credit rationing, discount rate variation, and moral suasion; (2) to increase the protection to the reserve banks themselves for credits granted; (8) to compensate for the less rigid insistence by the reserve banks on technical qualifications in credit granting and thus to make possible greater extensions of credit to members than can be had on the strict merit of the paper offered for discount; and (4) to acquiesce in greater degree to the traditional methods of Inter-bank finance and to break down the isolation of the reserve banks from the business and financial world. Each of these reasons is examined and criticized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1963 economists Milton Friedman and David Meiselman published a paper for the Commission on "Money and Credit," in which they attempt to test the relative predictive power of Keynesian and monetary theories of business fluctuations. Their methods and conclusions were sharply disputed in papers by scholars Donald Hester, Albert Ando and Franco Modigliani, and Michael DePrano and Thomas Mayer. The purpose is to review this controversy. The method is the simple one of first replicating the studies over the original sample periods and then examining the postsample performance of the competing equations. On a sociological level there can be little doubt that this controversy was and continues to be, enormously valuable. Many economists have been stimulated to work on the questions disputed by the monetarist and Keynesian combatants and it is probably correct to argue that two models of the U.S. economy are a direct outgrowth of the controversy. What has been missing from this continuing controversy, however, is an ex post evaluation of the earlier empirical work.

The article suggests that there are three alternatives to overcome the U.S. balance payment of deficit. The author of this article argues that increasing crises occur in the system because of the udervaluation of gold, that the elasticity of the gold exchange standard based on the U.S. balance of payments has enabled the system to operate successfully in the past decade, and that the use of paper gold is the only device on which a lasting world monetary system can be based. The so called U.S. "balance-of-payments deficit" is the result of sign the growth in world demand for reserve media which, since 1958, could only be supplied by the U.S. and is not the consequence of a faulty adjustment mechanism. Elimination of the system of crises could be accomplished either by an increase in the real price of gold or by the introduction of paper gold, but the simultaneous elimination of the sequences of crises and the U.S. balance-of-payments deficit can only be resolved by the introduction of paper gold. Therefore a solution through paper gold is better than return to real gold.

It is very important to know how much we can extrapolate from a study's results. This paper examines the issue using data from impact evaluations in development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents an update on issues and events related to economic research in the U.S. as of June 1989. Information on the annual meeting of the American Economic Association; Interdisciplinary journal to be published by the center for the Study of Public Choice; Retirement of Will Lisner.

Presents information related to American Economic Association (AEA) and other similar associations. Relocation of the AEA Office of the Secretary-Treasurer, and the Allied Social Science Associations to 2014 Broadway, Suite 305, Nashville, Tennessee 37203; Call for papers for the January 1992 EAA meetings; Annual meeting of the Missouri Valley Economic Association.

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses the papers in the journal concerning economics in the U.S. and answers questions and answers concerning topics chosen at the 124th annual meeting of the American Economic Association held in January 2012, standards for the papers, and the publication of comments.

The article comments on the underlying theory and the conclusions on economic policy derived from the proposals by Professor Ragnar Frisch for a thorough study of balance of payments broken down by countries and currencies. Several countries, short of foreign exchange, balance their imports by state control at the amount available from exports and other sources; any increase in exports enables them to import more, any decrease in exports forces them to import less. In the U.S., on the other hand, the volume of imports is determined by private importers independently of the reserve position of the country; the total volume of imports is below the level determined by national income and relative prices, and no change of exports would influence the actual volume of imports. In these conditions, discrimination against imports from the U.S. will increase world trade.

Presents news briefs on the economic research community in the U.S. as of spring 1993. Decision of American Economic Association president-elect Amartya Sen to appoint a nominating committee for 1994; Papers called for by the periodical "Journal of Economic Perspectives"; Promotion of Andrea H. Beller as a professor at the School of Human Resources and Family Studies of the University of Illinois.

The article examines price fixing in the print paper manufacturing industry in the U.S. In 1916, the Federal Trade Commission conducted an investigation of the news print paper manufacturing industry. As one result of that investigation, the commission was convinced of the desirability of establishing reasonable and stable prices for news print paper, and endeavored to arrange for such prices by agreement with the manufacturers. While negotiations looking toward voluntary cooperation were under way, however, the Federal Grand Jury for the Second District of New York brought indictments against several leading manufacturers, whereupon negotiations with the commission were broken off. It is submitted that in a business in which there are numerous competitors, each subject to the ups and downs of competition, the principles applied in the valuation of public utilities cannot be used. A public utility, by its very nature, is a monopoly and furnishes a product which has a special and vital essentiality to the people of the community served. These characteristics do not apply to the manufacture of news print paper.

The article presents news briefs concerning the field of economics in the U.S. The Annual Meeting of the American Economic Association will be held in Chicago, Illinois from January 3-5, 1998. The National Head Start Bureau is expanding the number of its peer reviewers and consultants. David H. Feldman has been appointed as an economics professor at College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia.

This article summarizes the report of the managing editor of the American Economic Review journal, a publication of the American Economic Association, for 1978. The number of papers submitted this year is 649, compared with 690 in 1977. Submissions to the Review were at their highest (879) in 1970, and on average have been declining ever since. We printed 108 papers in 1978, 6 fewer than the preceding year. There is a backlog of 85 accepted papers, 28 will appear March 1979, and the remainder in June or September. The backlog of unprocessed manuscripts has remained at six months. That is, as of December 31, nearly all manuscripts received before the preceding June 30 have been processed. The authors have received some type of decision. It is not possible to cut this delay time further. The delay time may nevertheless account for the decline in the number of manuscripts submitted. I have discussed methods of speeding up the review process with members of the Board of Editors, with my assistants, and with the Executive Committee. Each proposal runs up against the problem of cost and satisfactory standard of performance. Because the Review is an association journal, papers cannot be rejected on the basis of a cursory examination.

Some observers have argued that the projections for high and rising debt pose a grave threat to the country's economic future and give the government has less fiscal space to respond to recessions or other unexpected developments, so they urge significant changes in tax or spending policies to reduce federal borrowing. In stark contrast, others have noted that interest rates on long-term federal debt are extremely low and have argued that such persistently low interest rates justify additional federal borrowing and investment, at least for the short and medium term. We analyze this controversy focusing on two main issues: the aging of the US population and interest rates on US government debt. It is generally understood that these factors play an important role in the projected path of the US debt-to-GDP ratio. What is less recognized is that these changes also have implications for the appropriate level of US debt. We argue that many-though not all- of the factors that may be contributing to the historically low level of interest rates imply that both federal debt and federal investment should be substantially larger than they would be otherwise. In conclusion, although significant policy changes to reduce federal budget deficits ultimately will be needed, they do not have to be implemented right away. Instead, the focus of federal budget policy over the coming decade should be to increase federal investment while enacting changes in federal spending and taxes that will reduce deficits gradually over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Commends economist Kevin M. Murphy and his role in the progress of the study of economics in the U.S. as of August 2000. Recognition received by Murphy from the American Economic Association in 1998; Qualities of Murphy that makes him an effective economist; List of Murphy's publications that tackles various aspects of economics.

This paper studies the contribution of both labor and non-labor income in the growth in income inequality in the United States and large European economies. The paper first shows that the capital to labor income ratio disproportionately increased among high-earnings individuals, further contributing to the growth in overall income inequality. That said, the magnitude of this effect is modest, and the predominant driver of the growth in income inequality in recent decades is the growth in labor earnings inequality. Far more important than the distinction between total income and labor income, is the way in which educational factors account for the growth in US labor and capital income inequality. Growing income gaps among different education groups as well as composition effects linked to a growing fraction of highly educated workers have been driving these effects, with a noticeable role of occupational and locational factors for women. Findings for large European economies indicate that inequality has been growing fast in Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom, though not in France. Capital income and education don't play as much as a role in these countries as in the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article evaluates the U.S. monetary policy and the global financial cycle (GFC) following the bankruptcy filing of investment banking firm Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. in the U.S. in 2008. Topics discussed include the role of the U.S. monetary policy as a driver of GFC, characterization of GFC including the movements of risky asset prices, credit growth, and gross capital flows, and impact of the monetary policy on longer-term interest rates years after 2009.

Two-year community colleges enroll nearly half of all first-time undergraduates in the United States, but to ambiguous effect: low persistence rates and the potential for diverting students from four-year institutions cast ambiguity over two-year colleges' contributions to upward mobility. This paper develops a new instrumental variables approach to identifying causal effects along multiple treatment margins, and applies it to linked education and earnings registries to disentangle the net impacts of two-year college access into two competing causal margins: significant value added for two-year entrants who otherwise would not have attended college, but negative impacts on students diverted from immediate four-year entry. (JEL I23, I26, I28, J24, J31) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many price indices must be constructed without quantity data at the elementary level. The paper shows that for some consumer goods in the United States and other countries, one can approximate expenditure shares using weights derived from the retail distribution of sellers. These weights are based on the share of outlets selling an item, or the share of outlets adjusted by the total number of items sold in each. Relative to using no weights, the paper finds that using such imputed weights substantially reduces bias in the frequency of price changes, in annual inflation, and in price comparisons across countries. (JEL E31, L11, L81, O11, O14) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article provides information on the activities of the American Economic Association (AEA). It presents a call for papers for the January 1992 AEA Meetings. The AEA will offer a series of seminars on topics and techniques at the 1900 annual meeting. An overview on the Intellectual Property and the Construction of Authorship conference is offered. The Research and Training Program on Poverty, the Underclass and Public Policy of the University of Michigan offers one-year post-doctoral fellowships to U.S. minority scholars who wants to expand their knowledge on social sciences.

This paper seeks to review how globalization might explain the recent trends in real and relative wages in the United States. We begin with an overview of what is new during the last 10-15 years in globalization, productivity, and patterns of U.S. earnings. To preview our results, we then work through four main findings: First, there is only mixed evidence that trade in goods, intermediates, and services has been raising inequality between more- and less-skilled workers. Second, it is more possible, although far from proven, that globalization has been boosting the real and relative earnings of superstars. The usual trade-in-goods mechanisms probably have not done this. But other globalization channels-such as the combination of greater tradability of services and larger market sizes abroad-may be playing an important role. Third, seeing this possible role requires expanding standard Heckscher-Ohlin trade models, partly by adding insights of more recent research with heterogeneous firms and workers. Finally, our expanded trade framework offers new insights on the sobering fact of pervasive real-income declines for the large majority of Americans in the past decade. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Written in celebration of the 100th anniversary of the American Economic Review, this paper recounts the history of the journal. The recounting has an analytic core that sees the American Economic Association as an organization supplying goods and services to its members, one of which is the Review. Early in its history the Review was a multipurpose publication with highly disparate content. Over time the economics profession expanded and more economics research was produced, primarily in the form of journal articles. Editors accommodated this shift by allocating more resources to the refereeing and editing process and more space to research papers. (JEL A14, B19, B29) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article, divided into four sections, discusses Steven D. Levitt's literary work that focuses on the fundamental issues of economics in America. The first section considers Steve's work on economics of crime and the impact of public policies on criminal activity and crime rate. The second section deals with Steve's research on political economy, campaign finance and the determinants of electoral success. The third one describes Steve's research on a variety of subjects like strategy choice in professional soccer and the fatality risk of drinking drivers. In the fourth and last section, the author opines that many of the issues addressed by Steve display breadth and power of economic analysis.

The article offers information on the racism challenges, along with discusses the media access and consumption in the civil rights era in the U.S. It mentions that media and information technologies are important during political change and social movements. It discusses U.S.'s most significant breakthrough in racial equality and justice since Reconstruction.

The article presents information about several new books related to industrial organization. The book "Economics Meets Sociology in Strategic Management," brings strategic management theorists and economic sociologists together to discuss their approaches to firms, allowing each field to view the same broad topics in their diverse manners Each of the four section presents two previously published papers. Another book "Writing Off Ideas: Taxation, Foundations and Philanthropy in America," explores the impact of the institutional environment, including tax laws, on the nonprofit foundations of the U.S., focusing, primarily on the public policy ideas that are financed with foundations grants. The book "Public-Private Policy Partnerships," explores the intersectoral relationships between public and private organizations across several different policy arenas. The book focuses on the public-private partnership, public-private technology partnerships, re-thinking the future of commercial nuclear power, an organizational analysis of the public-private partnership in the provision of public infrastructure, etc.

The article offers news briefs related to the American Economic Association (AEA). The Annual Meeting of the AEA will be held in Washington D.C. from January 6-8, 1995. Harold Hotelling was appointed chairman of the Department of Humanities at Lawrence Technological University in Southfield, Michigan. Bruce E. Hansen was selected as associate professor of economics at Boston College in Massachusetts.

This paper establishes a new fact about the compositional changes in the pool of unemployed over the US business cycle. Using microdata from the Current Population Survey for the years 1962-2012, it documents that in recessions the pool of unemployed shifts toward workers with high wages in their previous job and that these shifts are driven by the high cyclicality of separations for high-wage workers. The paper finds that standard theories of wage setting and unemployment have difficulty in explaining these patterns and evaluates a number of alternative theories that do better in accounting for the new fact. (JEL E24, E32, J31, J63, J64) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper shows that racial composition shocks during the Great Migration (1940–1970) reduced the gains from growing up in the northern United States for Black families and can explain 27 percent of the region's racial upward mobility gap today. I identify northern Black share increases by interacting pre-1940 Black migrants' location choices with predicted southern county out-migration. Locational changes, not negative selection of families, explain lower upward mobility, with persistent segregation and increased crime and policing as plausible mechanisms. The case of the Great Migration provides a more nuanced view of moving to opportunity when destination reactions are taken into account. (JEL H75, H76, J15, J62, K42, N32, R23) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a report from the Committee on Economic Education of the American Economic Association. During a series of meetings in New Orleans, Louisiana in 2008 the Committee hosted six sessions, including those devoted to high school and undergraduate economics education in the U.S., graduate-level economics education, and undergraduate economics courses. Panel members and those who delivered papers at these sessions are acknowledged. In addition, the author notes that the number of bachelor's degrees conferred in economics during 2006-2007 declined slightly from the previous period.

We study the competitive forces which shaped ideological diversity in the US press in the early twentieth century. We find that households preferred like-minded news and that newspapers used their political orientation to differentiate from competitors. We formulate a model of newspaper demand, entry, and political affiliation choice in which newspapers compete for both readers and advertisers. We use a combination of estimation and calibration to identify the model's parameters from novel data on newspaper circulation, costs, and revenues. The estimated model implies that competition enhances ideological diversity, that the market undersupplies diversity, and that optimal competition policy requires accounting for the two-sidedness of the news market. (JEL D72, K21, L13, L41, L82, N42, N72) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rate of inflation fell far less over the period 2007-2013 than in the period 1979-1985 despite similar large increases in the unemployment rate. This paper asks why. Possible explanations include a change in the persistence of inflation, changes in NAIRU, and other shocks. A change in the persistence of inflation, with inflation more anchored in the period 2007-2013 than in the period 1979-1985, is found to be important. The level and change in the NAIRU cannot be precisely estimated, but the data suggest an increase of nearly 1 percentage point since 2007. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents news briefs on the field of academic economics in the U.S. as of June 1988. Schedule of the annual meeting of the American Economic Association; Purpose of the Liberal Arts Fellowships offered by Harvard Law School in Cambridge, Massachusetts; Information on an essay contest organized by the Council on International and Public Affairs.

This article highlights the written reports presented by Robert Clower, managing editor of the American Economic Review, at the annual meeting of the American Economic Association in December 1981. The year 1981 has seen some changes in editorial procedures. Outside editorial scanners are no longer used. Comments on already published papers are now sent to the original authors for their information and reaction before being submitted to independent review by members of the Board of Editors or other disinterested parties. Office processing controls have been designed to ensure that, except in most unusual circumstances, authors will have a final editorial decision within three months of the date their manuscript is received. The Review received 784 papers in 1981, 20 percent more than the average number processed during each of the preceding five years. The acceptance rate on manuscripts for which processing has been completed is well below the ratio of published-to-submitted papers. This does not reflect a permanent upward shift in acceptance standards; it is merely a consequence of current efforts to reduce the backlog of papers awaiting publication. The Board of Editors consists of 18 members, chosen by the managing editor, with the approval of the Executive Committee of the Association.

This paper reexamines the behavior of inflation and unemployment and reaches four conclusions: 1) The U.S. Phillips curve is alive and well (at least as well as in the past). 2) Inflation expectations however have become steadily more anchored. 3) The slope of the curve has substantially declined. But the decline dates back to the 1980s rather than to the crisis. 4) The standard error of the residual in the relation is large, especially in comparison to the low level of inflation. Each of the four conclusions presents challenges for the conduct of monetary policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) conducts analyses on a large variety of economic issues, publishes books, working papers, and two periodicals, sponsors conferences and holds workshops and seminars as part of an annual summer institute. Approximately 280 economists at universilies across the U..S. contribute to NBER's working paper series, and many other economists, here and abroad, attend conferences and the summer institute. The NBER also sponsors large scale projects which bring together researchers from several of these programs. One major project centers on the role of Government Budget and the Private Economy. In addition, NBER is currently sponsoring several smaller projects. Jeffrey Sachs is directing a project on Developing Country Debt. Richard Freeman heads a study of International Migration. Alan Auerbach is leading an examination of Mergers and Acquisitions. Martin Feldstein is directing a study of the Effects of Taxation on Capital Formation. And David Wise heads a project on the Economics of Aging.

The article discusses the publication of papers presented at the annual meeting of the organization the American Economic Association (AEA) between January 3, 2014, and January 5, 2014, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the structure of the annual meeting, and the selection of papers for presentation. It recognizes several members of the AEA Program Committee including scholars Joseph Altonji, Alan Auerbach, and Nicholas Bloom.