Knowledge that Transforms

The Committee presented three paper sessions at the 2007 AEA meetings in Chicago. A session on “The Market and Premarket for Graduate Students in Economics” was organized and chaired by Alan Krueger. One paper in the session, by Paul Oyer (Stanford), investigates how macroeconomic conditions affect initial placements, how initial placement affects long-term success, and how patterns in career progression relate to the organizational form of economics departments. A paper by Wayne Grove (LeMoyne College) and Stephen Wu (Hamilton College) studies the relationship between graduate school admissions criteria, degree completion rates, and career publications. A third paper, by Susan Athey (Harvard), Lawrence Katz (Harvard), Alan Krueger (Princeton), Steven Levitt (Chicago), and James Poterba (MIT), investigates how well GRE scores predict student performance in both microeconomics and macroeconomics, the relationship between first-year performance in graduate school and attrition rates for males and females, first-year performance as a predictor of job market placements across different subfields, and the effect of firstyear performance in student choices of courses and fields in the second year of their programs. Three Committee members—David Colander, Michael Salemi, and Wendy Stock—were discussants. These three papers are published in this issue of the AER. The second session dealt with the “Evaluation and Time Allocations in Teaching Economics.” It was organized by Michael Watts and chaired by Barry Chiswick. Four papers were included: “Student Evaluation of Teaching Revisited” by Bruce Weinberg, Belton Fleisher, and Masanori Hashimoto (all of Ohio State); “Time Allocations and Reward Structures for Academic Economists from 1995–2005” by Cynthia Harter (Eastern Kentucky), William Becker (Indiana University), and Michael Watts (Purdue); “Time Allocations to Undergraduate and Graduate Teaching in Economics and Other Disciplines” by Sam Allgood and William Walstad (both at Nebraska, Lincoln); and “Long-Term Effects of Economics Coursework on College Graduates’ Behaviors and Outcomes in the Labor Market” by Report of the Committee on Economic Education

Arguably the most aggressive affirmative action program ever implemented in the United States was a series of court-ordered racial hiring quotas imposed on municipal police departments.My best estimate of the effect of court-ordered affirmative action on workforce composition is a 14 percentage point gain in the fraction African American among newly hired officers.Evidence on police performance is mixed.Despite substantial black-white test score differences on police department entrance examinations, city crime rates appear unaffected by litigation.However, litigation lowers slightly both arrests per crime and the fraction black among serious arrestees.

We study a multi-sector model of growth with differences in TFP growth rates across sectors and derive sufficient conditions for the coexistence of structural change, characterized by sectoral labor reallocation, and balanced aggregate growth. The conditions are weak restrictions on the utility and production functions commonly applied by macroeconomists. Per capita output grows at the rate of labor-augmenting technological progress in the capital-producing sector and employment moves to low-growth sectors. In the limit all employment converges to two sectors, the slowest-growing consumption-goods sector and the capital-goods sector.