Scholarly Comments on Academic Economics

Volume 7, Issue 1, January 2010

In this issue:

Symposium on the Euro:

It Can’t Happen, It’s a Bad Idea, It Won’t Last: U.S. Economists on the European monetary union and the euro, 1989-2002

Lars Jonung and Eoin Drea give an account of what US economists were saying about the prospect of European monetary unification and the euro—quite often negative and pessimistic.

Leading players in the story explain their thinking today and in retrospect:

305 Economists Called to Answer Questionnaire on the FDA:

Daniel Klein, Jason Briggeman, and Kevin Rollins have designed a questionnaire about the economic rationale for the policy that makes new drugs and devices banned until individually permitted by the FDA. Klein and Briggeman present the questionnaire and the list of economists. Will anyone provide a sensible market-failure rationale for the policy?

Outliers and the Halloween Effect:

EJW previously featured an outliers-based critique of an AER article purporting an aberrant pattern in stock returns called the “Halloween effect.” Here Doug Witte re-examines the critique, explores the handling of outliers, and offers vindication of the original AER article.

Table of Contents with links to articles (pdf)

Download and print entire January 2010 issue (2.15 MB) (pdf)