2009 MEA Annual Meeting

March 20-22, 2009

Marriott Cleveland Downtown at Key Center

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The Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland is opening just for our attendees on Friday, March 20 from 11:30 - 2:00. 
The main lobby and museum will be staffed with guides during this time. Attendees can drop in and learn about the Bank's architecture, the historic main lobby, and tour the Learning Center and Money Museum. Enter the East Sixth doors.  Photo ID required for admittance. 

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Check out Positively Cleveland

NOTES FROM MEA PRESIDENT JOEL MOKYR:

I am delighted to be able to welcome you all to Cleveland for the 73rd meeting of the Midwest Economics Association. Since we met last year, a lot has changed in the world, and it falls on us as economists to try to make sense of the current economic crisis and to provide politicians with advice and suggestions as to how to turn around the growing menace of another depression. Economic historians, of course, are working overtime as they are constantly being quizzed on the extent that our current crisis resembles or differs from the Great Depression. Let us all hope that the fate of the Depression will differ from that of World War I. That war, after all, was known until 1939 as “the Great War,” but was subsequently demoted to be known as World War I. It is to be hoped that the Great Depression of the 1930s will keep its moniker and will not become “The First Great Depression.”

Such hopes are especially acute in the Midwest, where the decline in output and rise in unemployment is higher than elsewhere in the nation. It is therefore appropriate and understandable that the program this year is quite rich in papers that deal with topics that bear directly on our current economic predicament. By my count, we have no fewer than twelve sessions that deal with aspects of the current crisis, including two fascinating sessions organized by the Cleveland Fed, namely session 2k on “The Problem of Vacant and Abandoned Properties”  and session 3e on “The Federal Reserve and the Financial Crisis of 2007-2008." Much as the 1930s were a serious shock to the complacency of the Economics profession that until that time was by and large uninterested in issues of unemployment and deflation, so it might be expected that our current crisis will steer the profession in new directions. Guessing where those new directions will lead would be foolhardy, but one could do worse than to come to Cleveland for the MEA meetings to see what the best academic and research economists are thinking.

While the economic crisis thus inevitably serves as a focusing device for the current thinking and research of economists, the economics profession has in recent years broadened its scope of interest and applied economic analysis and econometrics to an ever widening array of social and private issues that previously were exclusively in the realm of sociologists, political scientists, psychologists, and human biologists. Our program this year reflects this breadth. Economists today are investigating the full gamut of the human experience on this planet, from obesity to corruption, from learning to crime. For the socially aware, there are sessions on poverty, the environment, and discrimination. Yet the standard issues of taxation, asset prices, and auctions are equally represented. A rich and diverse intellectual smorgasbord thus awaits our guests in Cleveland. Bon Appetit!

It is a particular pleasure for me to welcome Elhanan Helpman who will be giving the C. Woody Thompson lecture on Friday at 5:15. Helpman, the Galen L. Stone Professor of International Trade at Harvard, is one of the best-known and respected applied theorists of our age, who has done foundational work in establishing the modern micro-based theory of international trade, as well as made deep and lasting contributions to political economy. His lecture is entitled "Trade and Labor Market Outcomes."

My Presidential address will take place on Saturday at 5:15 and will be on “The Cultural Origins of Modern Economic Growth.”

I should like to thank the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland and executive V.P. Mark Sniderman and the Case Western Reserve University’s Weatherhead School of Management and economics department chairman James Rebitzer for sponsoring some of the events at the conference.   I will also take this opportunity to thank my predecessors in this position, my former colleague V.V. Chari of the University of Minnesota and Patricia Reagan from Ohio State, and to welcome my successor and Chicago neighbor President Elect  Derek Neal and his successor, President Elect designate Jeff Wooldridge of Michigan State. Thanks also to my 1st vice president and Northwestern colleague Therese McGuire and to Scott Drewianka, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, my 2nd Vice President.

An organization such as the Midwest Economic Association could never function without a few dedicated individuals who are deeply committed to its goals. Those who have made this organization what it is are its secretary-treasurer Bill Ferguson and its managing secretary Jeanette Copeman, whose efficiency and loyalty to the MEA knows no bounds.


Joel Mokyr
Robert H. Strotz Professor of Arts and Sciences
Professor of Economics and History
Northwestern University