Volume 22, Issue 1 (April 2021)

The EconomicDynamics Newsletter is a free supplement to the Review of Economic Dynamics (RED). It is published twice a year in April and November.

• • • EconomicDynamics Research Agenda: Stefanie Stantcheva on Taxes, Transfers, and Redistribution

    • EconomicDynamics Interview: Nick Bloom on “Working From Home (WFH)”

    • SED: Letter from the President: Watch Video or Read Letter

    • RED: Letter from the Coordinating Editor

    • SED Meeting: Message from Program Chairs

Marina Azzimonti and Loukas Karabarbounis, Editors.

Letter from the President

Dear Colleagues,

Before sharing SED news, let me start with some thank yous! As all of you know well, this has been a very tough year with the global pandemic still raging. With this as the backdrop, the 2020 program chairs and officers have done twice the job asked of them. Let me start with the program chairs, Doireann Fitzgerald and Nir Jaimovich, who have been organizing the annual meeting now for two years! They were asked to chair the Barcelona 2020 meeting, which was cancelled in 2020 and then postponed twice. Doireann and Nir have handled two submission rounds so that we could include our younger colleagues graduating last year in the midst of the pandemic. Next, I want to thank the SED Secretary, Marina Azzimonti, and Treasurer, Erwan Quintin. No decisions get made without consultations with them and there have been quite a few this year. This time in addition to the regular tasks related to running the website and bank accounts is above and beyond what they signed on for. For those of you that regularly attend the SED meetings, I encourage you to send thank yous.

Let me turn now to the news. By January 2021, it was clear that we would have to postpone the Barcelona meeting again. The local organizers— Jordi Caballe, Joan Llull, Albert Marcet, and Raul Santaeulalia-Llopis—predicted that Spain would not be ready to accept foreign visitors by June of 2021. They turned out to be correct. Because we had moved the Taipei and Cartagena meetings by a year already, we decided to have the Barcelona meeting in June of 2024. Reluctant to miss yet another year, the Minneapolis team stepped up. With help from colleagues Anmol Bhandari, Kyle Herkenhoff, Hannes Malmberg, and Joseph Mullins and staff members Kirstyn Ouverson and Kara Kersteter, we are hosting the 2021 SED annual meeting at the University of Minnesota campus in
the Twin Cities. We’re all very excited for the event, which will be the first conference on the campus to have an in-person segment!

The dates for this year’s meeting are July 1-3, 2021. We are excited to have Emi Nakamura, Nicola Fuchs-Schundeln, and Guido Menzio  as our plenary speakers. Guido has already confirmed that he will be here in person. Because we are a truly global society, Doireann and Nir are updating the usual schedule. We will have plenary talks in the middle of the day. We also plan to record all sessions so that our colleagues on the other side of the globe do not have to be awake at 3 in the morning to watch sessions live. We have 800 registered for the conference and are now conducting a second registration for those interested in coming in person. There are 21 parallel sessions and we have secured 21 large classrooms here at the University. However, we must abide by CDC rules and, therefore, can only use a subset of seats in each classroom. That puts a cap of roughly 300 that we can have in person. We are also going to require that anyone coming in person be fully vaccinated by July 1 and currently in the United States. We’re very disappointed that we could not open it up completely, but the logistics of that would have doomed any chance of having an in-person segment.

The dates for next year’s meeting in Taipei are also set. The conference will be held June 22-24, 2022. Ping Wang of Washington University in St. Louis and hosts at the Institute of Economics at the Academia Sinica are busy making plans. I’m also happy to announce that Yongseok Shin and Yan Bai have agreed to be the program co-chairs. By July, Doireann and Nir will probably be releived to pass on the baton. For summer 2023, we are still scheduled to meet in Cartagena. David Perez-Reyna will be heading up the local team of organizers and the conference will be co-hosted by the Universidad de los Andes (Uniandes) and Universidad Tecnologica de Bolivar (UTB).

In other news, I want to thank the organizers of the ASSA sessions in January, namely Oleg Itskhoki, Larry Christiano, and Yueran Ma. We also had a very special panel session on the contributions of Emmanuel Farhi to economics.  A very special thanks to Pierre-Olivier Gourichas, Larry Christiano, Yueran Ma — and all of Emmanuel’s students and colleagues for this memorable tribute.

I encourage everyone to check out the SED website and SED Twitter account for updates on our summer event.

Ellen McGrattan

President, Society for Economic Dynamics

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Letter from the Coordinating Editor

Dear readers, authors, and friends,

I am writing with some updates on the editorial organization and processes at the Review of Economic Dynamics.

Editorial members  

The current editorial board is:

Editors: M. Bassetto, M. Doepke, G. Gancia, M. Iacoviello, L. Karabarbounis (Coordinating), D. Lagakos, M. De Nardi, E. Schaal, A. Tambalotti, P.-O. Weill.

Associate Editors:  S. Albanesi, M. Azzimonti, Y. Bai, D. Berger, A. Burstein, H. Chade, M. Eden, J. Eeckhout, A. Eisfeldt, D. Fitzgerald, J. La’O,  J. Lise, L. Lochner, M. Mazzocco,  L. Paciello, F. Postel-Vinay, P. Restrepo-Echavarria, L. Rudanko, K. Ruhl, T. Schoellman, A. Shourideh, V. Sterk, J. Thomas, C. Tonetti, M. Trabandt, V. Venkateswaren, G. Vereshchagina, J. Wieland, C. Zimmermann.

Conflicts of interest.  

The RED has established policies ensuring that no conflicts of interest arise when evaluating papers.

• Referees cannot submit reports for papers written by colleagues, recent coauthors, advisors, advisees, family members, or by authors who have close personal relationships with the referee. Referees are expected to disclose if a conflict arises inadvertently.

• Editors cannot handle papers written by colleagues, recent coauthors, advisors, advisees, family members, or by authors who have close personal relationships with the Editor. Editors are expected to disclose if a conflict arises inadvertently.

• Members of the editorial board who submit papers receive evaluations from two Editors. Submissions from members of the editorial board cannot receive a positive outcome unless both Editors independently agree to the positive outcome.

Editorial turnaround statistics.  

The RED offers high quality and fast reviews to authors. The table below summarizes our statistics for decisions on first submissions between 06/25/2020 and 05/02/2021:

 Our goal is to make the RED one of the most efficient journals in economics, by targeting a roughly two-month average turnaround for papers that pass the desk and by desk rejecting as soon as an initial evaluation is feasible. I would like to sincerely thank our wonderful referees who, despite the constraints imposed by the pandemic, continue to offer constructive reports to authors in a timely manner.

Best,

Loukas Karabarbounis

Coordinating Editor, Review of Economic Dynamics

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Message from the Program Chairs

Dear all,

We are very excited to share with you the program for this year’s hybrid SED Meeting, hosted in Minneapolis by the University of Minnesota. This year’s expanded program combines papers from the 2020 and 2021 Calls for Papers.

Many thanks to our fantastic Committee of 49 young economists, who selected an amazing set of papers, not once, but twice, under conditions of great uncertainty.

There will be a total of 252 regular sessions including 756 papers, making this the biggest SED ever. This includes eight Covid-19 sessions highlighting the best of economic research on the pandemic. While a hybrid conference is not as much fun as an in-person conference, it does reduce the costs of participation for economists scattered across the globe. We are particularly happy to report that more than 40% of presenters are based outside the US.

We hope that all participants, whether they attend virtually or in person, will enjoy the first – and hopefully, last – pandemic SED.

Best,

Doireann and Nir.

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