Comments by:
Spengler Recalled as Caring
Teacher
Joseph J. Spengler, James B. Duke Professor Emeritus of Economics, died last January after a long bout with Alzheimer's disease. He was 88 years old.
Perhaps Duke's most renowned economist, the Ohio State University-educated Spengler joined the Duke faculty in 1932 and helped put the Duke on the map.
Professor Spengler was a founder of the field of economic demography.
The Duke Economics Department's graduate student organization is named in honor of Spengler.
In addition to teaching at Duke, the Universities of Arizona, Chicago, Pittsburgh, North Carolina, Kyoto and Malaya, Professor Spengler served variously as President of the American Economic Association, the Southern Economic Association, the Population Association of America, the History of Economics Society, and the Atlantic Economic Society.
Spengler is survived by his wife, Dorothy, who still resides at the Spengler home on Cranford Road, just around the corner from Duke, and by two sisters, Gertrude Arbegast of Cincinnati, and Elizabeth Boston of Naples, Florida.
If the mathematics of the era were less terse, the intellectual requirements were no less stringent. Without the safe haven of well-specified sub-specialties, the graduate student of those days had to have a broad view of economics. With the explosion of economic knowledge, that meant keeping up with a wide range of new developments.
Economics at Duke asked graduates of the Ph.D. program to relate their memories of experiences with Professor Spengler. Since he was an active member of the Duke community for nearly half a century, that's a lot of memories.
The portrait that emerges is that of a versatile scholar, a demanding teacher, and an empathetic adviser. Above all, Professor Spengler was a well-rounded person with a keen sense of humor. As former Duke president Senator Terry Sanford said in Spengler's obituary as reported in the Duke Chronicle, Spengler's "letters to the president over the time of his service should be collected and published as a guidebook for new presidents."
Here is a compilation of those stories.
Professor Spengler's student C. Brice Ratchford (Ph.D., 1951), President Emeritus of the University of Missouri, recalled Spengler as being a "very warm, human being.' The following recollection also reveals something of the change in student-faculty relations over the years.
"We worked on my dissertation on his back porch. He dearly loved the birds, and he perceived cats to be their mortal enemy. He had a home-made slingshot and always managed to have a good supply of steel ball bearings. Without saying a word, he would reach for the slingshot, load it with a ball bearing, and shoot at the cat quite a few yards away. More often than not he would hit the offending cat."
Robert M. Will, a 1958 Ph.D. who wrote under Spengler and is now an economics professor at the University of British Columbia, remembers Spengler as a "formidable personality ... [with] a tender, sensitive other side which, combined with Dot's (Mrs. Spengler's) natural warmth, bestowed a special meaning to being a graduate student for those who came within the orbit of their special attention and kindness."
"We learned over and above what Joe held us strictly accountable for was a unique style in relating to graduate students which, for those of us who have chosen the academic life, give us a model to live up to in relating to our own graduate students.... These lessons we were as likely to learn on Cranford Road, or on a trip with the Spenglers to the campus cafeteria at Chapel Hill, as in the classroom or in Joe's office. We were 'Joe's students.'"
Professor Will recalls how it was "delightful and wonderfully innocent" to be "a member of the Spenglers' surrogate family. One Sunday afternoon Craufurd Goodwin and I were invited to go for an afternoon drive ... stopping somewhere along the way to get an ice cream cone. It must have been some sight with the two of us--two grown men, as my Mother would have said--sitting in the back seat licking away on an ice cream cone, with Joe in the front seat doing the same."
Will painted a keen picture of a scholar in his environment, "one hot sticky day, stripped down to his shorts, working away at his typewriter which he had perched on an orange crate amongst the most incredible collection and disarray of books, journals, reprints and manuscripts. This image of what I took to be Joe's normal working space served as my definition of organized chaos until, many years later, I was exposed to our teenagers' bedrooms. And being taken through and around the garden by Dot. It is the highest form of justice that she should be permitted to enjoy it for so long. One day she was showing us the many drawings and diagrams she had, showing the location of every shrub and bulb, when Joe teasingly interrupted to say that she had more maps than Christopher Columbus--a remark that left him vulnerable to the suspicion that he had not read as widely as we students had assumed."
Will related two anecdotes that made the rounds when he was a student. "One we students liked, and tended to believe, was that a journal was bankrupted in the '30s typesetting his footnotes. A story we were responsible for ourselves was that Dot either dressed Joe or laid out his clothes each morning, so niftily coordinated always were his bow tie, coloured shirt, and suit."
Finally, Will regarded the worst aspect of being Professor Spengler's student as "trying to read his handwriting."
Fred Gottheil, Professor of Economics at the University of Illinois, earned his Ph.D. in 1959 under Spengler's tutelage. Gottheil reported that "there was an unspoken affection between Professor Spengler and his students, even though it appeared to be a down-to-earth, business-like relationship.
Gottheil recalled his dissertation defense. "I was in Joe Spengler's office a few minutes before the defense of my thesis. He went over the list of faculty who were to question me. He told me how to approach each one, what they will probably ask, and how I can best satisfy their questions. When I got into the room, it worked just as he had said. The defense seemed to be nothing more than a breeze. Until the last questioner was Joe Spengler himself. He was so tough on me, I thought my career was over! He stared at me dispassionately, making it unbelievable that we had had an intimate conversation just an hour ago. The only clue he gave me during his questioning that I would survive was his constant reference to: 'When you put this into book form.'"
Gottheil recalls another defense, this by his roommate and close friend Ian McDonald of his thesis proposal. "Toward the end of Ian's defense of the proposal, Spengler, in the audience, raised his hand as if to ask a question. When acknowledged, instead of asking his question, he turned to me sitting in the back row of the classroom and asked why I had no questions for Mr. Mcdonald. I was stunned! He had never done this before to any student, and I could not understand why he singled me out. Perhaps it was because I had asked questions at seminars before, but I feel it was because he knew that Ian and I were very good friends and felt that the business of our profession should not be compromised by friendship."
Gottheil summed up his reminiscence with the following story. "One evening seminar at Allan Cartter's house, Spengler walked in, somewhat late, with Brinley Thomas, a visiting professor from Wales. Spengler was laughing, joking, chewing on a cigar, and backslapping. I saw him then as the very affectionate person I always suspected he was. It was difficult not to be impressed by his intellectual power and guarded affection."
Charles K. Fairchild, a senior economist with CSR Inc., in Washington, DC, who completed his Ph.D. in 1971 under Spengler, recounts an interesting picture of preliminary examinations--what we call "qualifying exams" today.
"Preliminary examinations were a near disaster. Four of us took our exams early, at or near the end of our second year of course work. We all failed the written exam miserably ... Dr. Charles Ferguson called us into his office and read the riot act to us. He said he would allow us to continue to orals, but if we failed to answer a single question of his, he would fail us on both the written and the oral.... When it came time for the orals, Dr. Ferguson led off, and I answered all his questions ... until he demanded that I stop talking! ... I don't think I answered a single question correctly from Dr. Frank de Vyver . . . and I know I answered Dr. Winsborough's question on the difference between longitudinal and cross-sectional life tables exactly backwards! Nonetheless, the next day I received in my mail slot a single sheet of 5x8 yellow memo paper which said, 'Mr. Fairchild - The Committee gave you pass. JJS.' I will always believe that Dr. Spengler encouraged the members of the committee toward a favorable decision."
One of Spengler's last students, Javaid R. Khwaja, received his Ph.D. in 1976. He remembers Professor Spengler as "one of the truest libertarians, whose liberalism was of his own kind, and time seems to be the only arbiter to render a final judgment on the merits of his argument."
Khwaja came to Duke from Pakistan at the height of the controversy over the war in Southeast Asia. "Though the stress of the times was quite clear, I cannot remember an occasion ever that he did not have time to attend to any of the details. Indeed, he was a very hospitable person who every once in a while wanted the discussion to be carried out on a lunch at The Oak Room."
The final contributor to this mosaic was John Menefee, Ph.D. 1974. Although Menefee was directed in his thesis research by Neil de Marchi, he nonetheless was well-exposed to Professor Spengler. Menefee wrote:
"In our first year, nearly the whole new graduate class was taking the History of Political Economy taught be Spengler. Our problems were as follow: The course text was Spengler's textbook, which had been out of print for 10 years. As a consequence, the reading list was all original sources in German, Sanskrit, French and numerous other unintelligible languages which we were supposed to read since we could not get the textbook. The reading list itself was about 50 to 75 pages, with the reading for each class running about 1,500 to 3,000 pages."
"In one class, an unknowing first-year student asked Dr. Spengler to explain a growth relationship. He proceeded to go to the blackboard, draw X and Y axes and then a couple of lines on the graph. The student raised his hand and asked Dr. Spengler, 'What are on the axes labels?' Dr. Spengler replied, 'It doesn't make any difference what are on the axes. You could explain such a relationship no matter what.' As the student persisted to question him about how you might interpret the axes, he then went into a 45-minute discussion of how any relationship could be explained in relation to history of political economy in a two-dimensional framework. The rest of us just shook our heads and wondered how we would ever make it through his course."
"Once, upon visiting Dr. Spengler's office to try to get a better grasp of some of the obscure sources that were needed for the class, I asked him a question about a topic with which he immediately responded, 'Oh, yes,' he knew exactly what I needed, and turned around to find a book. For anyone who was ever in his office, there were stacks of books and papers everywhere with just a small path to his desk. He proceeded to walk over to his bookcase, and with a five foot stick knock down books that were stacked nearly all the way to the top of the ceiling. After knocking down eight or ten books, he found the one he wanted, gave it to me and said, 'Here look through this one.'"
"The way Dr. Spengler developed papers was that he would write everything on note cards. Whenever he wanted to write a paper, the inside joke among the graduate students is that he merely took one of the numerous stacks of his note cards, shuffled it and wrote another paper."
Professor Martin Bronfenbrenner has returned to the United States after six-and-a-half years in Japan, where he taught at Tokyo's Aoyama Gakuin University. After teaching a semester at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas, Professor Bronfenbrenner returned to Duke for the Fall 1991 semester.
Professor Charles Clotfelter is acting as President-elect of the Southern Economic Association. Clotfelter organized the recently-completed annual meeting of the SEA in Nashville, Tennessee, and he will deliver the Presidential Address at the 1992 SEA annual meeting.
Professor William Gentry's dissertation, "The Effects of Taxation on Financial Decisions and Organizational Form: Evidence from Publicly Traded Partnerships," won the National Tax Association's Outstanding Dissertation Prize for 1991. In conjunction with winning, Gentry attended the association's annual meeting in Williamsburg, Virginia during November. While at the conference, he presented two papers. First, as an award winner, he presented a summary of his thesis, "Capital Taxation and Publicly Traded Partnerships: A Summary." In a session unrelated to the dissertation prize, Gentry presented "Taxes and Organizational Form: The Rise and Fall of Publicly Traded Partnerships," which will also be published in the NTA Papers and Proceedings volume.
Professor W. Kip Viscusi has joined the editorial council of the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management and the Journal of Risk and Insurance.
Professor E. Roy Weintraub will be on leave during the Fall 1992 semester when he will take up the appointment as the Cassa di Risparmio Distinguished Visiting Professor of Economics at the University of Venice Ca Foscari.
A joint Duke University-University of North Carolina Undergraduate Center in Soviet and East European Studies has been established under a three-year, $600,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Education. The program will provide two $18,000 FLAS graduate fellowships, one of which is expected to be awarded to an economics student. Professor Vladimir Treml is serving as Director of the new Center. The biggest problem currently faced by the center is what to call itself, considering the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the separatist aims of most Eastern European nationalities.
Professor Anne O. Krueger has been appointed to a three-year term on the Executive Committee and Council of the International Economic Association. She is also an International Commissioner of the International Baltic Economic Commission.
Professor A. W. Coats has been appointed Associate Editor of History of Political Economy.
Professor W. Kip Viscusi has prepared guidelines for the valuation of life for the Federal Aviation Administration. The guidelines will be used in the FAA's setting of aviation safety standards. In November, Viscusi made a general presentation of the methodology for use throughout the U.S. Department of Transportation.
Professor Henry Grabowski, Chairman of the Duke Economics Department, in July presented the Sixth Annual Invited Lecture at the Centre for Medicines Research of the Royal College of Physicians, London, England. Grabowski's talk concerned the returns and risk of pharmaceutical research and development. There were over 180 guests of the Royal College in attendance.
In his lecture, Grabowski reviewed the costs of researching and developing a new chemical entity (NCE), considered the returns on pharmaceutical R&D and considered the implications for the future structure of the global pharmaceutical industry. His recent research indicates that the cost for each new drug introduced onto the U.S. market in the 1980s averaged over $200 million in 1987 dollars. The distribution of returns are also highly skewed. Consequently, industrial firms are increasingly financially dependent on a small number of blockbuster products. The economics of the R&D process has also led to increased industry consolidation in recent years. Although the analysis was undertaken from a U.S. perspective, similar trends are apparent in other countries undertaking pharmaceutical R&D activities.
After the talk, Henry and Virginia Grabowski were the main guests of honor at a dinner at the Royal College of Physicians which was attended by several members of Parliament along with leading figures from academia and industry in the United Kingdom.
Professor Thomas Naylor has been elected to the Board of Directors of the Christian Children's Fund, the largest private children's support program in the world.
Professor E. Roy Weintraub has been selected to given the Plenary Session Invited Address at the World Congress of the International Economic Association in Moscow during August, 1992. His address will be entitled, "New Directions in the History of Economic Thought."
Professor Vladimir Treml will be teaching macroeconomic theory at the Department of Economics, Moscow State University, during the Spring 1992 semester.
Professor Roy Weintraub is currently serving an interregnum second-year term as chairman of the Duke Academic Council. Weintraub previously held the post in 1981-1982.
Professor Hervé Moulin attended the International Conference on Game Theory, Florence, Italy, in June. He was invited to deliver a "plenary session" lecture attended by about 300 participants. In July, he returned to Italy to present a lecture at the Workshop on Ethics and Economics in Siena. Moulin also visited the economics department at the Université de Montreal in May. Professor Moulin delivered lectures in departmental seminars at the University of Texas (March), Yale, Brown, Harvard, and Rice (April), and Washington University in St. Louis (September).
Professor Allen Kelley presented his paper, "Revision Revisited: An Essay on the Population Debate in Historical Perspective," at the Nobel Symposium in Economics in Lund, Sweden, during December as part of the Nobel Prize award ceremonies. Professor Kelley in September attended a conference in Paris on Development and Rapid Demographic Growth: A New Look at the Future of Africa, where he presented his paper, "African Urbanization and City Growth: Perspectives, Problems and Policies."
Professor Vladimir Treml visited the Soviet Union during the summer of 1991, where he offered consultation to the state statistical agencies of the (former) USSR and the Russian and Ukrainian Republics, under an "exchange and advise" program administered by the U.S. Bureau of the Census.
Professor Henry Grabowski presented two papers in Washington, "International Competition in Pharmaceutical R&D," in January at the National Science Foundation's National Science Board on Industrial Support for R&D, and in June, "Research and Development in an Era of Global Competition," at the Conference on American Pharmaceuticals in the Global Village, sponsored by the U.S. Department of State. Grabowski also addressed a conference in France, sponsored by Tufts University, on Cost Containment and Pharmaceuticals. His paper was: "The Effects of Medicaid Formularies on the Availability of New Drugs."
Professor James Baumgardner presented his paper, "What Is a Specialist, Anyway?" at the Harvard-Boston- MIT Health Seminar Series during April, at the Rochester Symposium on Health Economics in May, and at the Southern Economics Association meetings in Nashville in November. Baumgardner also visited the Harvard Medical School in January, where he presented his paper, "Forms of Insurance Contract and the Pattern of Technical Change in Medical Care."
Professor Thomas Naylor acted as a Duke Alumni lecturer on a cruise from Istanbul across the Black Sea and up the Danube River to Vienna, with stops in USSR, Romania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Austria. Naylor also addressed Duke Alumni chapters in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Washington, and Richmond.
Professor W. Kip Viscusi maintained a busy itinerary during 1991. In March, he presented the paper, "Fostering Accurate Risk Perceptions: The Role of Government and the Courts" at the CATO Institute's second annual regulation conference. In April, he presented the paper, "Bayesian Expected Utility with Ambiguous Belief Aversion," at the Wharton School. In May, he participated in the American Enterprise Institute conference on federalism and regulation. In June, Viscusi ran a Federal Judicial Center course for federal judges, held in Naples, Florida, on the economics of government risk regulation. In August, he gave a speech on "The Economics of Workers' Compensation" at a conference in Greensboro, sponsored by the North Carolina Industrial Commission. In November, he presented testimony on product liability and competitiveness before the U.S. Senate Committee on Small Business, Subcommittee on Competitiveness and Economic Opportunity. During the year Viscusi also attended several conferences in Boston and Philadelphia for the American Law Institute Project on Compensation and Liability for Product and Process Injuries.
Professor Anne O. Krueger also maintained a busy itinerary. In January, she hopped first to the University of Washington, where she gave a lecture, "The Political Economy of American Protection in Theory and in Practice," as part of the Lecture Series on Systems in Flux, then to Washington, D.C., to attend the Lima, Peru, Institute for Liberty and Democracy's first annual Program Review Conference. In November, she made two stops in Minnesota, first at the University of Minnesota, where she lectured at the Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs on "The World Trading System in Disarray," then at St. Cloud State U., where she was the keynote speaker at the 29th Annual Economic Education Winter Institute Lecture Series. Her talk was "Impact of EURO'92: A U.S. Perspective." In March, Professor Krueger participated in the Sixth Annual Conference on Macroeconomics, sponsored by the National Bureau of Economic Research, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She then traveled to Prague, Czechoslovakia, to attend the IRIS/IPS conference on the Transition to a Market Economy--Institutional Aspects. April saw her take trips to Middlebury College, Vermont, where she spoke on "Reflections on the COGEE Report: Graduate Education in Economics," then to Washington, D.C., to participate on a panel on "From Alaska to Tierra del Fuego: An Inter- American Free Trade Zone?" co-sponsored by the Harvard Club of Washington and by the Argentine Embassy. In June, Professor Krueger made three stops abroad. First, she was the luncheon speaker at the Annual Meetings of the Canadian Economics Association, speaking on "Changing Perceptions of Governmental Capabilities in the 1990s." Her next stop was Warsaw, Poland, where she presented a paper on "Trade Reform and Long-Run Employment Prospects," to a World Bank conference on Trade Liberalization. Her final stop of the month was in Taipei, Taiwan, where she was co-organizer of the Second Annual East Asia Seminar on Economics, "Trade and Protectionism," sponsored by the NBER. She presented her paper, "American Bilateral Trading Arrangements and East Asian Interests." In July she returned to Seattle, to attend the 66th Annual Western Economic Association International Conference. In September, Professor Krueger returned to Europe to attend the Kiel Institute of World Economics conference, "Privatization," in honor of Herbert Giersch, in Kiel, Germany. In October, she addressed the International Political Economy Workshop of Columbia University, speaking on "The Political Economy of Agricultural Pricing Policy." Later that month, she attended in Indianapolis a Hudson Institute-sponsored conference of the International Baltic Commission (of which she is a commission member). From there, she went to the University of Michigan, to attend a conference on Analytical and Negotiating Issues in the Global Trading System, sponsored by the Institute of Public Policy Studies and the Department of Economics.
Professor A. W. Coats lectured on Mercantilism and on Institutionalism at Leicester Polytechnic during November, 1991.
Professor George Tauchen presented papers at the 1991 Interface Meeting, as well as at 1991 econometrics workshops at the University of British Columbia, the University of Manitoba, Cornell University, and VPI.
James Baumgardner, "The Interaction between Forms of Insurance Contract and Types of Technical Change in Medical Care," RAND Journal of Economics, Spring 1991; "Specialization among Obstetrician/Gynecologists: Another Dimension of Physician Supply" (with William D. Marder), Medical Care, March 1991.
Martin Bronfenbrenner, "Japan: Fascism with a Human Face?" Aoyama Kokusai Seikei Ronsi (October, 1990); "Say's Law, Walras' Law, and the International Balances," Shogaku Ronshu (March, 1991).
Edwin Burmeister, editor (with Robert A. Becker), Growth Theory. Vol. I: Descriptive Growth Theories, Vol. II: Optimal Growth Theories, Vol. III: Equilibrium Growth Theories (London: Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd., 1991), including "Descriptive Growth Theories," "Optimal Growth Theories," and "Equilibrium Growth Theories" (all with Becker); "The Residual Market Factor, the APT, and Mean-Variance Efficiency" (with Marjorie B. McElroy), Review of Quantitative Finance and Accounting, January 1991.
A. W. Coats, "The Learned Journals in the Development of Economics and the Economics Profession: The British Case," and "Bibliography of Scholarly Articles on Economic Journals," Economic Notes. Monte dei Paschi di Siena (1991); "Economics as a Profession," in D. Greenaway, M. Bleaney, and 1. Stewart, eds., Companion to Contemporary Economic Thought (Omega Scientific: 1991); Editorial Commentary on William Retty, Political Arithmetick (with A. Aspromourgos, in Klassiker der Nationalonokonomie (Dusseldorf: Verlagsgrippe Handelsblatt, 1992).
Charles Clotfelter and Philip J. Cook, Selling Hope: State Lotteries in America, Harvard University Press, paperback edition, 1991; "Lotteries in the Real World," Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, 4(3), July, 1991, 227-232; "The Peculiar Scale Economies of Lotto," NBER working paper, 1991; "What Kind of Lottery for North Carolina?" Popular Government 56 (Spring 1951), 25-29.
Philip J. Cook, "The Social Costs of Drinking," in The Expert Meeting on the Negative Social Consequences of Alcohol Abuse, Norwegian Ministry of Health and Social Affairs, Oslo, Norway, 1991; "The Technology of Personal Violence," in Michael Tonry, ed., Crime and Justice: An Annual Review of Research Vol. 14 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 1991, pp. 1-72; Review of Michael Tonry and Norval Morris (eds.), Drugs and Crime in Journal of Policy Analysis & Management 10(3), Summer 1991.
Neil de Marchi, ed. (with Mark Blaug), Appraising Economic Theories (Worcester: Billing and Sons, Ltd., 1991); "League of Nations Economics and the Ideal of Peaceful Change," History of Political Economy 1991.
Craufurd D. W. Goodwin, (editor) Economics and National Security: A History of Their Interaction, Duke University Press, 1991; Missing the Boat: The Failure to Internationalize American Higher Education (with Michael Nacht), Cambridge University Press, 1991; The Forgotten Payoff. Support for International Educational Exchange among American Private Foundations, The President's Commission on the Arts and Humanities, 1991.
Henry G. Grabowski, "The Changing Economics of Pharmaceutical Research and Development" in Annetine C. Gillijns and Ethan A. Halm, eds., The Changing Economics of Medical Technology (Washington: National Academy Press, 1991); "Product Liability in the Pharmaceutical Industry," in Peter W. Huber and Robert Litan, eds., The Liability Maze: The Impact of Law on Safely and Innovation (Washington: Brookings Institution, 1991); "The Cost of Innovation in the Pharmaceutical Industry" (with Joe DiMasi, Ron Hansen and Lou Lasagna), Journal of Health Economics, Vol. 10, 1991, pp. 107-142; "Pharmaceutical Research and Development: Returns and Risk," Centre for Medicines Research (Surrey, England: Centre for Medicines Research Annual Lecture, 1991).
Daniel A. Graham and John M. Vernon, "A Note on Decentralized Natural Monopoly Regulation," Southern Economic Journal, July 1991, 273-275.
Thomas M. Havrilesky, "Comment on 'Policy Preferences of FOMC Members as Revealed by Dissenting Votes', by Susan Belden" (with John Gildea), Journal of Money, Credit and Banking (February 1991); "Alan Greenspan," in Biographical Directory of the Board of Governors, Bernard Katz, ed., (Greenwood Publishers: 1991); "Reliable and Unreliable Appointees to the Board of Governors" (with John Gildea), Public Choice (1991); "The Frequency of Signaling from the Administration to the Federal Reserve," Journal of Money, Credit and Banking (1991); "The Chairman as Hero: Our Defense against Monetary Excess," Cato Journal (Fall 1991); "Screening FOMC Members for their Biases and Dependability" (with John Gildea), Economics and Politics (1991); "The Psychopathology of Monetary Policy," Contemporary Policy Issues (1991).
Allen C. Kelley, "Kenya at the Turning Point" (with C. Nobbe), World Bank, 1991; "DevDev: A Balanced, Moderate and Eclectic Perspective," in International Family Planning Perspectives, Vol. 16(4), December 1990, pp. 143-145; "The B- Economics Major: Can and Should We Do Better?" (with John Siegfried, et al.), American Economic Review (May 1991), pp. 20-26; "The Economics Major in American Higher Education" (with John Siegfried, et al.), in The Challenge of Connecting Learning: Reports from the Fields, Washington: Association of American Colleges, 1991, pp. 43-60; "The Status and Prospects of the Economics Major" (with John Siegfried, et al.), Journal of Economic Education (Summer 1991), pp. 197-224; "Human Development Index: Use with Care," Population and Development Review (June 1991), pp. 315-324.
Kent P. Kimbrough, "The Inflation Tax," in The New Palgrave Dictionary of Money and Finance, edited by J. Eatwell, M. Milgate, and P. Newman (London: Macmillan); "Tax Regimes, Tariff Revenues, and Government Spending," Economica (with Grant Gardner).
Anne O. Krueger, The Political Economy of Agricultural Pricing Policy (ed., with Maurice Schiff and Alberto Valdés), 5 volumes: Vol. 1: Latin America (ed. with Schiff and Valdés), and Vol. 2: Asia (ed., with Schiff and Valdés); Economia Politica de las intervenciones de precios agricolas en america latina (ed., with Schiff and Valdés), Banco Mundial y Centro Internacional para el Desarrollo Economico, San Francisco, 1990; Perspectives on Trade and Development, University of Chicago Press and Harvester Wheatsheaf: Oxford, 1990; The Political Economy of International Trade (ed., with Ronald W. Jones), Basil Blackwell, 1990; "Pacific Growth and Macroeconomic Performance: Models and Issues," in Mohamed Ariff, ed., The Pacific Economy: Growth and External Stability, Allen and Unwin: North Sydney, New South Wales, 1991; "Report of the Commission on Graduate Education in Economics," Journal of Economic Literature XXIX, September 1991; "Economists' Changing Perceptions of Government," Weltwirtschaftliches Archiv, 126, 2, 1990; "Benefits and Costs of Late Development," in P. Higgonnet, D. S. Landes and H. Rosovsky, editors, Favorites of Fortune: Technology, Growth, and Economic Development since the Industrial Revolution, Harvard U. Press: Cambridge, 1991; "Aid in the Development Process," in Hans Singler, Neelamber Hatti and Rameshwar Tandon, editors, Aid and External Financing in the 1990s, New World Order Series, Vol. 9, Indus Publishing Company: New Delhi, 1991; "Decision-Making at the Outset of the Debt Crisis: Analytical and Conceptual Issues," in Rudiger Dornbusch and Steve Marcus, eds., International Money and Debt: Challenges for the World Economy, International Center for Economic Growth: San Francisco, 1991; "Industrial Development and Liberalization," in Lawrence Krause and Kim Kihwan, eds., Liberalization and Economic Development, U. of California Press, 1991; "Trends in the Trade Policies of Developing Countries," in Charles Pearson and James Riedel, eds., The Direction of Trade Policy: Papers in Honour of Isaiah Frank, Basil Blackwell, 1990; Comment on 1. M. Destler, "U.S. Trade Policymaking in the Eighties," in Alberto Alesina and Geoffrey Carliner, eds., Politics and Economics in the Eighties, Chicago: U. of Chicago Press, 1991, 381-384; Comment on Susan Collins, "Saving Behavior in Ten Developing Countries," in B. Douglas Bernheim and John B. Shove, editors, National Saving and Economic Performance, U. of Chicago Press: Chicago, 1991, 372-375; Review of Lance Taylor, Varieties of Stabilization Experience: Towards Sensible Macroeconomics in the Third World, in Economic Development and Cultural Change, 39, 4, July 1991, 898-902.
Robert Marshall, "Posterior Probabilities of the Independence Axiom with Non-Experimental Data" (with Jean-Francois Richard and Gary A. Zarkin, Journal of Business and Economic Statistics (forthcoming); "The Private Attorney General Meets Public Contract Law: Procurement Oversight by Protest" (with Michael J. Meurer and Jean- Francois Richard), Hofstra Law Review (forthcoming).
Marjorie McElroy, "The Residual Market Factor, the APT, and Mean-Variance Efficiency" (with E. Burmeister), Review of Quantitative Finance and Accounting, January 1991; "On Gilbert's Tests of Theories of Economic Methodology," in Mark Blaug and Neil de Marchi, eds., Appraising Economic Theories (Worcester-Billing and Sons, Ltd., 1991).
Ellen McGrattan, "Solving the Stochastic Growth Model by Linear-Quadratic Approximations," Journal of Business and Economic Statistics Vol. 8, 41-44 (1990); "Government Policy and Aggregate Fluctuations," Revista de Analisis Economico (forthcoming).
Hervé Moulin, "Interpreting Common Ownership," Recherches Economiques de Louvain, 56, 303-326, 1990; "Uniform Externalities: Two Axioms for Fair Allocation," Journal of Public Economics, 43, 305-326, 1990; "Implementing a Public Project and Distributing Its Costs" (with Matthew Jackson), Journal of Economic Theory, 1991; "The Solidarity Axiom in Parametric Surplus Sharing Problems" (with Hans Keiding), Journal of Mathematical Economics 20, 1991; "All Sorry to Disagree: A General Principle for the Provision of Non-Rival Goods," Scandinavian Journal of Economics, 1991; "Welfare Bounds in the Cooperative Production Problem," Games and Economic Behavior, 1991; "Welfare Bounds in the Fair Division Problem," Journal of Economic Theory, 54, 321-337, 1991.
Thomas H. Naylor, The Cold War Legacy (Lexington Books, 1991); "Gorbachev in Perspective," The Christian Century (Sept. 4-11, 1991); "Challenging the Political Parties," The Journal of Commerce (Jan. 9, 1991); "Gorbachev's New Order," The Journal of Commerce (Mar. 1, 1991).
George E. Tauchen, Nonparametric and Semiparametric Methods in Econometrics and Statistics (co-edited with William A. Barnett and James Powell), Proceedings of the Fifth International Symposium in Economic Theory and Econometrics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), including his article (with A. R. Gallant and D. Hsieh, "On Fitting a Recalcitrant Series: The Pound/Dollar Exchange Rate, 1974-1983"; "Quadrature-Based Methods of Approximating Nonlinear Asset Pricing Models" (with R. Hussey), Econometrica Vol. 59, No. 2 (March 1991).
Edward Tower, "On Shadow Prices, Effective Protection, and Domestic Resource Cost," in David Greenaway, Michael Bleaney and Ian Steward (eds.), Economic Perspectives (Routledge, 1991); "On the Symmetry between Effective Tariffs and Valued Added Subsidies," and "On the Validity of the Lerner Neutrality and Symmetry Theorems in the Presence of Non-Traded Goods" (with V. Canto and W. H. Kaempfer), in Industrial Policy and International Trade, Vol. 62 in Contemporary Studies in Economic and Financial Analysis (JAI Press, 1991); "Separability- -The One Principal and Serious Defect of Bickerdike's and Edgeworth's Elasticity Approach to Balance of Payments Adjustment Problems?" History of Political Economy (1991).
Vladimir Treml, "The Soviet Alcohol Culture and Gorbachev," in Soviet Social Problems (edited by Anthony Jones et al., Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1991), pp. 119-136; "Price Index for Soviet Machinery, 1965-1986," A Rand Note N-3297-USDP, 1991, 63 pp.
W. Kip Viscusi, Enterprise Responsibility for Personal Injury--Reporters' Study, Vol. I: The Institutional Framework, and Vol. II: Approaches to Legal and Institutional Change, Associate Reporter (with Paul Weilber, et al.); Reforming Products Liability (Cambridge: Harvard U. Press, 1991); "Social Insurance for Work and Project Injuries," Geneva Papers on Risk and Insurance Theory, 15, 2, 115-139 (Inaugural Lecture, Geneva Risk Economics Lectures); "The Dimensions of the Product Liability Crisis," Journal of Legal Studies, 20, 1 (1991), 147-178; "Rationalizing the Relationship between Product Liability and Innovation" (with Mike Moore), in P. Schuck, ed., Tort Law and the Public Interest: Competition, Innovation, and Consumer Welfare (New York: Norton, 1991) (American Bar Association-American Assembly vol.); "Estimation of State-Dependent Utility Functions Using Survey Data" (with William Evans), Review of Economics and Statistics, 73, 1 (1991), 94-104; "Lessons from Workers' Compensation for Tort Liability Reform," Third Annual John R. Commons Lecture (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991); "Toward a Proper Role for Hazard Warnings in Products Liability Cases," Journal of Products Liability, 13, 2 (1991), 139-163; "An Industrial Profile of the Product Liability-Innovation Linkage" (with Michael J. Moore), in R. Litan and P. Huber, eds., The Liability Maze: The Impact of Liability Law on Safety and Innovation (Washington: Brookings, 1991), 81-120; "Pricing Environmental Health Risks: Survey Assessments of Risk-Risk and Risk-Dollar Tradeoffs" (with Wesley A. Magat and Joel Huber), Journal of Environmental Economics and Management 21, 1 (1991), 32-51; "Product and Occupational Liability," Journal of Economic Perspectives, 5, 3 (1991), 71-91; "Economic Theories of Decision-Making under Uncertainty: Implications for Policy Analysis," in D. Weimer, ed., Policy Analysis and Economics: Developments, Tensions, Prospects (Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers), 85-109; "Worker Learning and Compensating Differentials" (with Michael J. Moore), Industrial and Labor Relations Review, 45, 1 (1991), 80-96; "Communication of Ambiguous Risk Information" (with Wesley A. Magat and Joel Huber), Theory and Decision, 31 (1991), 159-173; also to appear in John Geweke, ed., Conference Volume for the Fifth International Conference on the Foundation and Application of Utility, Risk, and Decision Theories (Boston: Kluwer); "Strategic and Ethical Issues in the Value of Life," in R. Zeckhauser, ed., The Strategy of Choice (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991), 359-387; Review of Uncertainty: A Guide to Dealing with Uncertainty in Quantitative Risk and Policy Analysis, by M.G. Morgan and Max Henrion, in Journal of Economic Literature, 29, 3 (1991), 1172-1174; "Risk Perceptions in Regulation, Tort Liability, and the Market," Regulation 14 (Fall 1991).
E. Roy Weintraub, Stabilizing Dynamics: Constructing Economic Knowledge (New York: Cambridge University Press), 1991; "Contextualizing Equilibrium Theory," Research in the History of Economic Thought and Methodology, 1991; "Historical Case Studies Are Made, Not Given," in N. de Marchi (ed.), Methodology of Economics (Boston: Kluwer, 1991); "Allais, Stability, and Liapunov Theory," History of Political Economy, 23 (3), Fall 1991; "Surveying Dynamics," The Journal of Post Keynesian Economics, 13 (4), Summer 1991.
William P. Yohe, (ed. and contributor) "Computer-based Research Advances in Economics," Social Science Computer Review, Winter 1990; Simulating the Ups and Downs of the U.S. Economy in the 1890s (assisted by J. Patrick Donavan) (software and user's manual), Dubuque, Iowa: Wm. C. Brown Publishers, 1991; Simulating the U.S. Economy During World War 11, Version 2.0 (software and user's manual), Dubuque, Iowa: Wm. C. Brown Publishers, 1991; Simulating the Great Depression in the United States, 1929-32, Version 3.0 (software and manual; compiled and spreadsheet versions), Dubuque, Iowa: Wm. C. Brown Publishers, 1991.
Professor Philip Cook has been awarded a contract with the Administrative Office of the Courts in North Carolina amounting to $118,000 to conduct a study on the costs of the murder adjudication in the state.
Professor Hervé Moulin has been awarded an NSF grant for $64,600 to study, "Non-Manipulable and Fair Allocation of Private Goods."
Professor Craufurd Goodwin is currently administering four grants, totalling over $1,000,000, for the Pew Charitable Trusts. Three of the grants are related to Goodwin's Economics and National Security project; the fourth concerns Extending the Public Policy Debate in Emerging Democracies.
Professor Kip Viscusi is project director on five research grants. He continues work on his energy efficiency/greenhouse effect grant from the EPA and has obtained addition funding for this project. In addition, he has received two new EPA grants, including a study on risk communication ranked first among 70 proposals submitted to the new EPA grant program on innovative environmental policy research. Viscusi has two NSF grants, one studying the product liability crisis and innovation, the other to study the insurance liability crisis of the mid-1980s.
Professor Anne O. Krueger has grants from the International Center for Economic Growth for research on Turkey, and from the Ford Foundation, the U.S. Agency for International Development, and Instituto Centroamericano de Administracion de Empresas, Quito, Ecuador, for work on Political Economy of Policy Reform in Developing Countries.
Professor Robert Marshall is administering grants from the National Science Foundation and from Pew Charitable Trusts. His NSF grant is for the study of Monte Carlo Simulations--Applications in Econometrics and Economic Modeling. His Pew grant is for the study of Decentralized Oversight of Procurement and Pricing.
Professor Marjorie McElroy has been awarded a three-year, $112,000 grant by the National Science Foundation for the Study of Family Decisions, Marriage Markets, and Altruism.
Professor George Tauchen has been awarded a $96,700 grant by the National Science Foundation for the Study of Extensions and Applications of SNP Models.
Kimberly Camille West, a Duke undergraduate majoring in political science and economics, was one of two recipients last spring of the University's Faculty Scholar Award. West won the award for her paper, "AIDS and the Anti-Gay Crusade," on the connection between AIDS, politics and public policy. The paper was published in the Duke Journal of Politics. The Faculty Scholar Award was established by the Academic Council in the mid-1970s to encourage University undergraduates to undertake scholarship and to continue it after graduation.
Colin Moran, a Duke undergraduate majoring in economics and history, was selected by Business Today magazine to participate in a four-day, expense-paid conference, "Resources and Responsibilities: Balancing Economics and the Environment." The conference was held at Princeton University. Two other Duke students, economics major Derek Hardesty and economics and history major Tali Gurion, were selected as alternate participants.
The Duke Chapter of the Omicron Delta Epsilon national economics honors society will feature a lecture in February by John Forlines, an alumnus of Duke's Trinity College and the Duke Law School. Forlines, who currently works for Morgan Guaranty Bank, will address the banking crisis in the United States.
Michael Boskin, Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors, will speak at Duke on February 26, 1992, as part of the Duke University/Omicron Delta Epsilon Distinguished Speakers Lecture Series.
Alan Resley was selected as one of the two finalists for the Graduate School's Dean's Award for Excellence in Teaching. The award, made possible by a grant from the Graduate School and the Alumni Association, recognizes outstanding teaching abilities and dedication in dealing with students. The award included a $500 prize.
Three economics graduate students, Peter Dohlman, Alan Resley, and Alison Hagy, were awarded William H. Glasson Dissertation Fellowships for the 1991-92 academic year.
A coach for all seasons, graduate student Dixie Reaves kept the Economics Department in the Duke Intramural spotlight for the entire 1991 year.
Along with the usual strong showings in softball (second place finishes in both summer leagues), the department fielded teams in flag football, volleyball, and basketball. The football team won its second straight recreation-division championship before losing in the playoffs to the playoff champions. The volleyball team also lost out to the eventual league champs.
In addition, three econ graduate students showed well at the Duke Intramural Track Meet. Paul Harrison blew out the field in the men's mile, while Dave Anderson won the men's 800 meters. Dixie Reaves won the women's 100 meters and the women's long jump.
The softball season was highlighted by an eight-game winning streak. The most exciting game of that streak was a 10-9 win over the first-summer-session champions. The game was forced to extra innings when the Invisible Hands scored five runs in the bottom of the sixth inning, and the game was won on a seventh-inning single to left by Jane Ordovensky that barely scored Paul Pecorino from third. It was Ordovensky's first-ever game-winning RBI.
The following graduate students received their Ph.D.'s in Economics during 1991:
Amy Farmer Curry, "Essays in Applied Microeconomic Theory: Cartel Stability, Follower Gains from Leadership Strategies, and Voting over Independent Attributes," supervisor Robert H. Bates.
Linz Audain, "An Essay in Law and Economics and Two Essays in the Economics of Law-Related Labor," supervisor Michael Meurer.
Tommy Loo, "Some Methodological Issues in Computable General Equilibrium Models," supervisor Ed Tower.
Shigeyuki Hamori, "Tests of the Asset Pricing Model in a Monetary Economy: Some Evidence of the U.S.A. and Japan," supervisor George Tauchen.
Clifford G. Gaddy, Jr., "Essays on the Labor Market and the Second Economy in the U.S.S.R.," supervisor Vladimir G. Treml.
Robert Leonard, "Essays in the History of Economic Thought: Theory and Institutions in the Mid-Twentieth Century," supervisor Craufurd Goodwin.
Theresa Carroll Malyshev, "The Opportunity Cost of Natural Resource Extraction in Developing Countries: A General Equilibrium Analysis," supervisor Robert Conrad.
Kevin Norman Rask, "The Social Costs of Production and the Structure of Technology in the Brazilian Ethanol Industry: A Cost-Benefit Analysis and an Infant Industry Evaluation, 1978-1987," supervisor Anne O. Krueger.
Ying Quian, "Selected Studies on Commodity Markets," supervisor Ed Tower.
Jorge Quiroz, "The Empirical Regularities of the Real Exchange Rate from a Modern Business Cycle Perspective: The Case of Chile," supervisor Kent P. Kimbrough.
Paul Pecorino, "Tax Policy, Trade Policy, and Long run Growth," supervisor Kent P. Kimbrough.
Jill Marie Tiefenthaler, "Essays in Household Decision-Making: Empirical Evidence from Cebu Island, Philippines," supervisor Anne O. Krueger.
Milton DeKalb Terrell, Jr., "Econometric Contributions to Specification of Functional Forms in Production Theory," supervisor John Geweke.
Recent placements of economics doctoral graduates include:
Jeanine D. Braithwaite (1988), Assistant Professor, American University.
Amy Farmer Curry (1991), Assistant Professor, University of Arkansas.
Clifford G. Gaddy (1991), Economist, The Brookings Institution.
Paul Pecorino (1991), Assistant Professor, University of Mississippi.
Jorge Quiroz (1991), Ilades-Georgetown.
Kevin N. Rask (1991), Assistant Professor, Colgate University.
Milton D. "Dek" Terrell (1991), Assistant Professor, Kansas State University.
Jill Tiefenthaler (1991), Assistant Professor, Colgate University.
John Menefee (Ph.D. 1974), serves as head of the survey analysis group for The Wyatt Company, an international benefits actuarial firm specializing in health and compensation-related consulting for Fortune 500 companies.
Out of 20 economics papers presented at the 23rd Annual Convention of the American Association of Slavic Studies, held in Miami during November, five were read by Duke-trained economists: Michael Alexeev (1984), James Leitzel (1987), Jeanine Braithwaite (1988), Clifford Gaddy (1991), and Kimberly Neuhauser (current student).