Stuart Scott, Bureau of Labor Statistics and 2009 Section Chair

From left: George McCabe, travel award winners Eric Aldrich and Irma Hernandez-Magallanes, and Stuart Scott

JSM 2009 set a new attendance record of roughly 6,800, about 1,200 more than Denver and nearly 800 more than Seattle. Our section had an exceptionally active year, with 30 technical sessions, including many in the areas of econometrics and seasonal time series. Thanks go to Barbara Rossi for a job well done. Thanks also go to Tucker McElroy and Brian Monsell for their contributions.

Siem Jan Koopman gave a very successful one-day short course, “State Space Time Series Analysis in Practice,” that included applications and was illustrated with OxMetrics software. There were 32 attendees.

About 35 attended the economic outlook luncheon, where Barry Bosworth made a highly engaging presentation, titled “Rebalancing the American Economy: Challenges to Recovery.” A senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, Bosworth admitted that he, like a great many other economists, failed to foresee the depth of the crisis that began with the expansion of subprime housing mortgages. He emphasized the importance of getting money into the hands of individuals and businesses quickly to stem the recession, but also argued against the country returning to the “consumption binge” from recent years.

Appreciation
Many people supported this year’s section activities:

Zellner Thesis Award
Victor Aguirregabiria, Bo Honore, Arthur Lewbel, Serena Ng (chair), and Stuart Scott

Student Travel Award
Torben Andersen, George McCabe, and Norm Swanson (chair)

Shiskin Award
David Findley and Bob Parker (chair)

Short Courses
Sung Ahn and Tucker McElroy

Fellows Committee
Bill Bell, Dave Dickey (chair), and John Geweke

Council of Sections
Willa Chen and Bill Wei

Also, thanks to Olivier Toubia, marketing chair, for supporting this year’s reception.

Three section members were selected as ASA Fellows this year: John Abowd, for contributions to confidentiality and labor economics; Sung Ahn, for excellence in time series research and applications to business and economics; and Chris Sims, for contributions to time series and macroeconometrics and for intellectual leadership.

George McCabe announced Eric Aldrich and Irma Hernandez-Magallanes as the Student Travel Award winners. They were sponsored by Ron Gallant and David Brillinger. Nancy Kowalski was given the Zellner Thesis Award for her MIT thesis, “Essays on Medical Care Using Semiparametric and Structural Econometrics.” The runner-up was Xun Tang, whose thesis was titled “Essays in Empirical Auctions and Partially Identified Econometric Models.”

The 2010 budget was approved and continues to support the awards mentioned above. There was a discussion to reduce and move toward elimination of annual deficits; some progress has already been made. Click here for minutes from the business meeting.

JSM 2010

Graham Elliott of the University of California, San Diego, and next year’s program chair announced plans for JSM 2010 invited sessions, including a memorial session honoring Clive Granger, Nobel laureate for economics, who died in May. It is not too early to think about organizing a topic-contributed session or planning a presentation for these meetings.