December 8, 2011
Dear AEA Member,
The program for the annual meetings of the AEA is now available. We meet, along with a variety of allied organizations, in Chicago on January 6 to 8, 2012.
In my capacity as chair of the program committee for the AEA's part of the meetings, I am writing to let you know about some of the highlights of the program.
In an effort to open the program to a wider range of presenters, we have continued to create sessions from the one thousand papers submitted individually. Historically, few individual submissions made it into the program, but for the past three years we have created 30 5-paper sessions from those submissions, grouping papers with related subjects.
The traditional main events of the AEA program are the presidential address and the Ely Lecture. This year, Orley Ashenfelter will be giving the AEA’s presidential speech, while Maurice Obstfeld is our Ely Lecturer.
We will have a full lineup of talks and panels on current economic topics. Richard Thaler speaks at the joint AEA/AFA luncheon, and Robert Hall will describe the contributions of Peter Diamond, Dale Mortensen and Christopher Pissarides at the luncheon honoring the 2010 Nobel Laureates in Economics.
For those of you who are looking for entertainment in the evening, in addition to the now traditional humor of the "stand up economics" session on Saturday night, we have continued the session of musical economists (classical, jazz and rock) on Friday night.
I look forward to seeing you in Chicago.
Sincerely,
Chris Sims, Program Committee Chair