Minutes of the Meeting of the Executive Committee in
The
first meeting of the 2007 Executive Committee was called to order at 10:10 A.M.
on April 20, 2007 in the London Room of the Hyatt Regency O’Hare,
Sargent asked for approval of the minutes of the previous meeting (January 4, 2007) which had been circulated in advance. The minutes were approved without substantive change.
Report
of the Secretary (Siegfried).
Siegfried reviewed the schedule for sites and dates of future meetings:
New Orleans, January 4-6, 2008 (Friday, Saturday, and Sunday); San Francisco,
January 3-5, 2009 (Saturday, Sunday, and Monday); Atlanta, January 3-5, 2010
(Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday); Denver, January 7-9, 2011 (Friday, Saturday, and
Sunday); Chicago, January 6-8, 2012 (Friday, Saturday, and Sunday); San Diego,
January 4-6, 2013 (Friday, Saturday, and Sunday); and Philadelphia, January
3-5, 2014 (Friday, Saturday, and Sunday).
The Executive Committee meets the day prior to the beginning of the
regular meeting each year.
Siegfried indicated that proposals for the 2015 ASSA
meetings were expected from hotels in
The
2007 meeting in
At
the previous meeting of the Executive Committee the Secretary was asked to
identify changes needed in the Bylaws, if any, to permit General Editors’
terms matching the academic year.
Siegfried explained that this could be accomplished by deleting the
words, “and for appointed,” from Article III, Section 3 of the
Bylaws. It was VOTED to recommend
to the membership such a change in the Bylaws.
The
Sarbanes-Oxley law requires 401(c)(3) organizations to have a whistleblower policy
to govern the receipt, retention, and treatment of complaints regarding
potential or actual violations of the Association’s Bylaws, and errors,
fraud, or deceit with respect to the Association’s financial records and
controls. It was VOTED to adopt a
whistleblower policy that accomplishes these objectives, and to insure that it
is disseminated to all employees of the Association.
The
Spring 2008 Executive Committee meeting will be either April 11 or April 18, in
Report
of Meeting of Editors of the AER and AEJs in
It
was agreed that the editors would assess the field content of the journals as
they write Calls for Papers. Some
content may be redistributed upon negotiation among editors. It was decided that there may be a
different number of Editorial Board members on each journal, that Editorial
Board members are not restricted to being in the
It
was decided that each AER or AEJ editor may summarily reject a paper
because content is inappropriate for his or her journal, and suggest that the
author(s) submit it to another of the Association’s journals without
consulting the other editors.
Unless an author opts into
file sharing, a submission to another Association journal will be treated
independently. Upon
submitting a paper to any of the Association’s refereed journals, an
author will be invited to indicate if the paper has been reviewed by one of the
other refereed journals and asked to indicate if he or she wishes the file from
the other journal to be shared.
Unless they wish to opt into file sharing, authors need not indicate if
a submission has been reviewed previously by another Association journal. Current plans are to ask referees, when
they submit reports to any of the refereed journals, whether their cover letter
may be shared among the journals.
Referee reports that are shared with authors are freely available for
sharing, but cover letters will be shared only if the referee agrees. Sharing of referee cover letters will be
considered further as the process evolves. The referee database will be shared
among all five refereed journals in order to avoid overuse of referees and to
reveal information about referee quality.
A
discussion of submission fees and referee payments concluded that the present
policies of the AER would be adopted
by the AEJs. It was recognized that submission fees
help to discourage inappropriate submissions. A discussion of referee payments
questioned whether the payments speed refereeing. It was recognized that referee payments
are a token of appreciation to referees, and serve more as a “thank
you” than as meaningful compensation.
The
AER uses a policy of summary
rejections (without formal refereeing).
About 20 percent of submissions to the AER are returned to authors without a full review, and the
submission fee is refunded. Those
20 percent of papers that are summarily rejected have virtually no chance of
being published in the journal.
Another 20 percent of submissions have little chance of success, but a
small possibility. For those, some AER co-editors use an expedited review,
making a decision after hearing from only one referee. AER
experience suggests that authors do not like summary rejections, even though it
expedites a decision. Each of the
new journals will use summary rejections, but only experience will reveal the
appropriate proportion of submissions to handle that way. The editors adopted a policy of no
appeals from rejection decisions.
It
was agreed that short turnaround time is an important goal, and the journals
may request reports from referees in six to eight weeks. The risk of asking for reports too
quickly is that referees decline to serve.
Each editor and/or co-editor will set his or her own policy.
The
AER is currently refereed
double-blind. There is an argument
that author(s) names should remain on a paper when it goes to referees because
in some cases referees know the author’s identity, either because they
have seen the manuscript in working paper form or have located it via
Google. The result is that some
papers are double-blind refereed and others are single-blind refereed, and the
editor would benefit from knowing whether or not the referee does, in fact, know
the identity of the author, because the editor might interpret the
referee’s report differently. In
contrast, double-blind refereeing is widely perceived to be fairer. It was decided that the AEJs would conform to AER policy of double-blind refereeing.
The
AER conflict policy is to not allow a
co-editor to handle the paper of a colleague, a current or recent co-author, or
a current or former student. It was
agreed among the AEJ editors to adopt
a similar policy with respect to colleagues and current students at the same
institution. Each of the AEJs will require both the editor and
co-editor to agree to publish a paper authored by a former student or recent or
current co-author of one of the editors.
It
was agreed to adopt the AER policy
requiring the deposit of data and programs used to analyze data for any paper
published with empirical results.
For papers using proprietary data, the programs used and a description
of how to obtain the data must be deposited.
It
was decided that there would be only one section (type) of papers in the AEJs. There followed an extensive discussion
of the desirability of allowing unrefereed signed comments and extensions on
each AEJ’s website. A final
decision on this issue was postponed.
Finally,
the size, style and cover for the new AEJs
was discussed. It was decided to
retain a professional designer to produce sample covers that both link to the AER and also distinguish the new
journals from each other, and from the AER,
and to print articles in a single column format (as it is difficult for a
reader’s eye to follow a lengthy line), thus probably reducing the width
of the journal. Decisions will be
made when the designer produces options.
The table of contents of each of the AEJs
will appear in the AER and in each of
the other AEJs.
Report
of the Nominating Committee (Feldstein). Feldstein, who chaired the Committee,
reported the following nominations for the indicated offices in 2008:
Vice-President—Katherine Abraham, Charles Manski, Maurice Obstfeld, and
Edward Prescott; Executive Committee—Susan Athey, Janice Eberly, Kyle
Bagwell, and Narayana Kocherlakota.
The Nominating Committee and those Executive Committee members present,
acting together as an Electoral College, VOTED to nominate Angus Deaton as
President-elect, and VOTED to name Orley Ashenfelter, Lloyd Shapley, and Oliver
Williamson as Distinguished Fellows of the Association.
Report
of the Honors and Awards Committee (Poterba). Poterba reported that the Honors and
Awards Committee (Poterba [chair], Bernheim, Kocherlakota, Levine, Manski,
Postlewaite, and C. Romer] solicited nominations for the Clark Medal from
chairs of all Ph.D. granting economics departments, from the
Association’s Executive Committee, from past winners of the Medal, and
from Deans of Business Schools. It
also considered carryover nominations from its deliberations two years prior.
After reducing the number of candidates to twelve, the Committee investigated
each candidate carefully and wrote a report summarizing the candidates’
accomplishments. At this point the
list of candidates was reduced to five, and a deeper analysis of the
contributions of those five to economic research was conducted. The candidates were then ranked and
presented to the Electoral College.
After further discussion, those Honors and Awards Committee and
Executive Committee members present, acting together as an Electoral College,
VOTED to award the Association’s 2007 John Bates Clark Medal to Susan
Athey. The Honors and Awards
Committee reported that Timothy Besley and John Sutton have been designated
Foreign Honorary Members of the Association.
There
followed a discussion of the procedures for selecting the Clark Medalist. It was noted that current procedures
permit members of the Executive Committee to nominate “candidates”
at the meeting of the Electoral College.
It was decided that “candidates” in this context mean either
those on the short list presented to the Electoral College by the Honors and
Awards Committee, or others designated by a member of the Executive Committee
to the Honors and Awards Committee sufficiently in advance so that a thorough
investigation of the individual’s research accomplishments could be
conducted prior to the meeting.
Report of the Editor of the American
Economic Review (Moffitt).
Acting on the Editor’s recommendation, the Executive Committee
VOTED to appoint Pinelopi Goldberg as co-editor of the AER for a three-year
term that expires June 30, 2010.
Goldberg replaces Judith Chevalier, whose term ends June 30, 2007. It also was VOTED to appoint Judith
Chevalier to a one-year term ending June 30, 2008, to appoint Christian Hellwig
to a three-year term ending March 31, 2010, and to reappoint Stephen Coate to a
second three-year term ending March 31, 2010 as members of the Board of Editors
of the AER.
Report of the Editor of the American
Economic Journal: Macroeconomics (Blanchard). Acting on the Editor’s
recommendation, the Executive Committee VOTED to appoint Steven Davis to a
three-year term starting May 1, 2007 and ending December 31, 2010 as co-editor
of the AEJ: Macroeconomics. It also was VOTED to appoint Mark
Aguiar, Yongsung Chang, William Easterly, Erik Hurst, David Laibson, Thomas
Philippon, Christina Romer, and Mark Watson to one-year terms ending June 30,
2008, Nicholas Bloom, John Campbell, Jordi Gali, Chad Jones, Jonathan Parker,
Chris Pissarides, David Romer, and Ivan Werning to two-year terms ending June
30, 2009, and Pierre Cahuc, John Cochrane, Martin Eichenbaum, Anil Kashyap,
Maurice Obstfeld, Valerie Ramey, Thomas Sargent, and Michael Woodford to
three-year terms ending June 30, 2010, as members of the Board of Editors of AEJ:Macroeconomics.
Report of the Editor of the American
Economic Journal: Microeconomics (Postlewaite). Acting on the Editor’s
recommendation, the Executive Committee VOTED to appoint Susan Athey to a
three-year term starting May 1, 2007 and ending December 31, 2010 as co-editor
of the AEJ: Microeconomics. It also was VOTED to appoint Dirk
Bergemann, Darrell Duffie, Liran Einav, Hanming Fang, Faruk Gul, Kenneth
Hendricks, Hugo Hopenhayn, Johannes Horner, Leslie Marx, Marc Melitz, Woijech
Olszewski, Ariel Pakes, Thomas Palfrey, Wolfgang Pesendorfer, Debraj Ray,
Philip Reny, Bernard Salanie, Michael Whinston, and Asher Wolinsky to
three-year terms ending June 30, 2010 as members of the Board of Editors of AEJ: Microeconomics.
Report
of the Editor of the American Economic
Journal: Economic Policy (Auerbach).
Acting on the Editor’s recommendation, the Executive Committee
VOTED to appoint Hilary Hoynes to a three-year term starting May 1, 2007 and
ending December 31, 2010 as co-editor of the AEJ: Economic Policy. It
also was VOTED to appoint James Banks, Rebecca Blank, Severin Borenstein, Julie
Cullen, Mihir Desai, Mark Duggan, Amy Finkelstein, Kristin Forbes, Austan
Goolsbee, Michael Greenstone, Jonathan Gruber, Louis Kaplow, Michael Keen,
Wojciech Kopczuk, Jeffrey Liebman, Brigitte Madrian, Thomas Nechyba, John
Quigley, Gerard Roland, and Jonathan Skinner to three-year terms ending June
30, 2010 as members of the Board of Editors of AEJ: Economic Policy.
Report of the Editor of the American
Economic Journal: Applied Economics (Siegfried for Duflo). Acting on the Editor’s
recommendation, the Executive Committee VOTED to appoint Thomas Lemieux to a
three-year term starting May 1, 2007 and ending December 31, 2010 as co-editor
of the AEJ: Applied Economics. It was also VOTED to appoint Jerome
Adda, Joshua Angrist, David Autor, Marianne Bertrand, John Bound, David Card, Andrew
Foster, Brian Jacob, Chinhui Juhn, Jeffrey Kling, Michael Kremer, David Lee,
Alan Manning, Edward Miguel, Sendhil Mullainathan, Rohini Pande, Luigi
Pistaferri, Imran Rasul, Antoinette Schoar, and Duncan Thomas to three-year
terms ending June 30, 2010 as members of the Board of Editors of AEJ: Applied Economics.
2008 Program
(Dixit). Dixit reported that his
Committee screened 249 proposed complete sessions and 731 individual papers
submitted for the 2008 meetings.
They accepted 102 (41 percent) complete sessions and 119 (16 percent)
individual papers; 31 percent of all submitted papers were accepted. Two contributed sessions will be
published in the Papers & Proceedings. Nicholas Stern will give the 2008 Ely
Lecture in
Report
of the Audit Committee (Chevalier).
The Audit Committee (Chevalier [Chair], Collins, and D. Romer) met with
the Association’s external auditors, Fraser, Dean, and Howard, by
teleconference on April 11, 2007. The
Audit Committee concluded that there are no material difficulties with the
Association’s accounting or financial control procedures. Acting on the recommendation of the
Audit Committee it was VOTED to accept the audit for 2006.
Ad Hoc Committee on Mentoring Workshops
(Case). With the financial support
of a National Science Foundation grant, the Committee on the Status of Women in
the Economics Profession has conducted mentoring workshops aimed at young women
economists. The national workshops
have involved random selection of applicants into treatment and control groups
so as to create a database for evaluating the effectiveness of the workshops
and subsequent networks that emerge from them. The NSF grant expires in 2010. Acting on the recommendation of the Ad Hoc Committee, (Anne Case [chair],
Janet Currie, Stephanie Ludvigson and Ellen McGrattan) it was VOTED to commit
the Association to supporting two national and two regional workshops for
mentoring young female economists over the period 2011 to 2014. The expected
cost of conducting and evaluating the workshops is about $220,000.
Ad Hoc Committee on Vice-president Term
Lengths (McFadden). Reporting
for the Committee (Dan McFadden [chair], Peter Diamond, Dale Jorgenson, and
Anne Krueger), McFadden proposed a change in the Association’s Bylaws so
that the two Vice-presidents continue to serve on the Executive Committee for
two additional years after their one-year term as Vice-president ends. The Committee said that lengthening the
terms of the Vice-presidents on the Executive Committee would increase the
level of experience on the Executive Committee and add diversity. It recognized that the proposed change
would increase the size of the Executive Committee and possibly lengthen
meetings, and increase travel costs.
A lengthy discussion revealed additional disadvantages of lengthening
the terms of the Vice-presidents, including changing the balance of the
Electoral College between the Executive Committee and the Nominating, and
Honors and Awards Committees, and leaving no distinction between the
Vice-presidents and the elected members of the Executive Committee. Eventually it was VOTED not to propose a
change in the Bylaws relative to the term lengths of the Vice-presidents.
Ad
Hoc Committee on the Job Market (Al Roth by teleconference). The Committee started a job market
“scramble” in March each year to help place remaining job
candidates into still vacant positions, and a “signaling” procedure
each November, through which candidates can indicate special interest in two
listed positions. Roth reported the
second year of the scramble worked more smoothly than the first, as candidates
and employers gained experience. He
also reported on the first year of signaling. In 2006, 969 job candidates sent
signals, including about 500 new economists awarded Ph.D.s by
Report
of the Treasurer (Siegfried). Siegfried
reported that the audited financial statements for 2006 show an operating surplus
of $1,041 thousand for 2006 in contrast to $1,240 thousand for 2005, and $573
thousand for 2004. Including
investment income and capital gains, there was an overall 2006 surplus of $2.8
million.
Siegfried
presented a revised budget for 2007, predicting an operating surplus of $330
thousand; $464 thousand had been predicted in January. Most of the revision was due to a $93
thousand reduction of expected membership dues and institutional subscriptions
based on the revised count of members and subscribers in March 2007.
The
combined operating surplus and portfolio gain increased the December 2006 ratio
of the Association’s accumulated net unrestricted assets to annual
expenditures (including the ASSA meeting gross) to 2.2, exceeding the target of
2.0 established by the Executive Committee in 1999. In view of expected one-time launch
costs of several million dollars for the Association’s new journals in
2007 and 2008, it is prudent for this ratio to exceed 2.0 temporarily.
The
Association’s net unrestricted assets as of December 31, 2006 were $15.9
million, up from $13.1 million on December 31, 2005. Net unrestricted assets reflect
“net worth.” Total
assets on December 31, 2006 were $19.7 million, of which $18.6 million
consisted of cash and financial investments and $1.0 million were accounts
receivable. Liabilities were $3.7
million, of which $2.9 million consisted of pre-paid membership dues and
subscriptions.
There
being no further business to conduct, it was VOTED to adjourn at 4:30 P.M.
Respectfully
submitted,
JOHN
J. SIEGFRIED, Secretary