President's Message

AAEA News and Updates

I am very excited to announce that Sendhil Mullainathan of Harvard University has agreed to deliver the Keynote Address on Sunday, August 4 to launch our summer meetings in Washington, DC. Professor Mullainathan is among the world’s leading economists and is an expert in economic development, behavioral economics, and corporate finance. His research addresses leading societal challenges such as corruption, poverty and discrimination from the perspective of behavioral economics. Professor Mullainathan is an entertaining and provocative speaker. For a preview, you can check out the following: www.ted.com/talks/sendhil_mullainathan.html.

I also want to take the opportunity to introduce new additions to our editorial teams for the AAEA journals. Jim Vercammen from UBC and JunJie Wu from Oregon State will be joining AJAE as editors replacing David Hennessy and Ed Taylor, whose terms expire at the end of 2013. Jim and JunJie are distinguished members of our profession, and we are pleased and fortunate that they have agreed to join the AJAE editorial team along with continuing editors Brian Roe and Madhu Khanna. Thanks to David and Ed for their great work with AJAE over the past four years.

Terry Hurley from the University of Minnesota has agreed to join the editorial team for AEPP. Terry has broad-based research interests and has published widely in areas of technology adoption, risk, food safety, and production of genetically modified crops. He is an ideal addition to the AEPP team as we seek to broaden the portfolio of papers submitted to and published in this journal. Terry replaces Tim Park of USDA ERS. We owe a special thanks to Tim who agreed to extend his term to facilitate Terry’s transition to the position. Terry joins continuing editors Joan Costa-i-Font, Ashok Mishra, and Spiro Stefanou.

I also want to officially welcome Mary Ahearn of USDA ERS to the Choices editorial team. Mary is already at work at Choices, joining continuing editor Jim Novak. Mary replaced Walt Armbruster, who guided Choices through its re-launching, and deserves enormous credit and the Association’s gratitude for his work with Choices and, more generally, his support of our profession.

Finally, I want to urge everyone to plan early to attend our summer meetings in Washington, DC from August 4 – 6. I am probably biased, but I think this meeting will be one of our biggest (based upon the number of paper submissions) and best ever. We have an outstanding lineup of plenary speakers including Julie Caswell, Martin Weitzman, and David Zilberman in addition to Sendhil Mullainathan, and we will be taking advantage of our location to bring in distinguished speakers from within the Beltway.

Richard Sexton
AAEA President