Archive for January, 2008

Meeting Overview 01/22/08

This week’s topic: illegal immigration.
FC: This issue has become political ping-pong. I’m all for it.
Gabriel : With respect to the illegals who are already here, certain candidates have suggested deportation. I think the lesser of evils would be to grant them amnesty. Anything else (eg. building a wall across the entire border) would be […]

Corporate Fraud

Not to be outdone by Slade’s prompt posting, I would like to post the research presented during the sessions I attended. The following pertains to Corporate Fraud, held in the New Orleans Sheraton on Friday, January 4th, 2008. Presiding over the session was Anil Shivdasani of UNC-Chapel Hill.

Jay R. Ritter, a professor of Finance at […]

Disaster Economics

One can hardly fathom a more appropriate location at which to host a roundtable discussion on disaster eonomics than the grand ballroom of a New Orleans hotel. Unfortunately, this session was somewhat limited in bent and scope. (It was sponsored by Economists for Peace and Security, and I’m pretty sure that all the panelists were […]

Charitable Giving

My second session on Friday I chose because it was so super-relevant to the work I did in Washington last year. When I finally arrived, I was surprised to discover that there exists an entire branch of economics dedicated to such topics as volunteerism and philanthropy. I really shouldn’t have been surprised, as the purpose […]

War and Political Instability

This might appeal to UES political science junkies like myself. Titled “War and Political Instability,” my Friday morning session included three paper presentations, by Ed Glaeser of Harvard, Carlos Seiglie of Rutgers, and Daria Sevastianova of the University of Southern Indiana, respectively. I’ll overview each.

Mr. Glaeser’s paper poses the questions: if wars are so incredibly […]

More Preliminary Thoughts

Exactly what happens when a delegation of students from the University of Florida converges on New Orleans to make its presence known at the annual AEA meetings? For my part, the experience was a worthwhile one. By day we sat in on scores of fascinating (if exhausting) paper presentations, and after dark we drank in […]

Preliminary AEA Thoughts

We have just completed our first day of AEA sessions and there is much to report. We heard things in our sessions both to shock and amaze.

Free Rice - Build Your Vocabulary and Feed the Poor

On October 7, 2007, Free Rice was brought into the internet to help feed the poor. It features a vocabulary building game where you match increasingly harder words with their synonyms. For every word you get correct, 20 grains of rice are donated to the UN World Food Programme. The money for the […]