News and Notices
I Change of Co-editors
On 30 June of this year, Glenn Otto stepped down from his position as Co-editor of the Economic Record. Glenn was first appointed as a Co-editor in July 2002, and has given his time generously to the many submissions he has handled over the past 6 years. The Economic Society of Australia and many authors are very appreciative of Glenn's many contributions. Glenn has kindly offered to look after all the submissions that he has been handling up to now. Authors who have been corresponding with Glenn over submissions should therefore continue to do so. Thank you Glenn!
Jeff Sheen commenced as Co-editor on 1 July 2008. We welcome Jeff to our team.
II Editorial Board
A key component of the Economic Record's functioning revolves around its Editorial Board. The Editor and Co-editors would like to express their thanks to Heather Anderson, Harry Bloch, Alison Booth, Jeff Borland, Harry Campbell, Deborah Cobb-Clark, Denise Doiron, Steve Dowrick, Mardi Dungey, Nic Groenewold, Murray Kemp, Michael Kidd, Frank Milne, Yew-Kwang Ng, Michael Parkin, Ranjan Ray, Elizabeth Savage, Peter Swan, Graeme Wells and Alan Woodland for wonderful service over the past few years, with a special thank you to those members whose terms have finished.
The Editorial Board for the Economic Record currently comprises: Heather Anderson, Harry Bloch, Alison Booth, Jeff Borland, Deborah Cobb-Clark, Denise Doiron, Steve Dowrick, Mardi Dungey, Denzil Fiebig, Simon Grant, Nic Groenewold, Michael Kidd, Vance Martin, Flavio Menezes, Rohan Pitchford, Ranjan Ray, Elizabeth Savage, Graeme Wells and Alan Woodland. A warm welcome to the new members, Denzil Fiebig, Simon Grant, Vance Martin, Flavio Menezes and Rohan Pitchford.
III The A R Bergstrom Prize in Econometrics: 2007
This Prize was established to reward the achievement of excellence in econometrics, as evidenced by a research paper in any area of econometrics. The Prize is open to New Zealand citizens or permanent residents of New Zealand who, on the closing date for applications, have current or recent (i.e. within 2 years) student status for a higher degree. The Prize is awarded once every 2 years, with a value of NZ$2000.
The Prize for 2007 has been awarded to Melanie Morten, PhD student, Yale University, for her paper ‘Healthy and Wealthy? Examining the Causality between Income and Life Expectancy’. The citation that accompanies the award reads as follows:
Melanie Morten's paper applies recently developed dynamic panel data methods to investigate the causal relationship between income and life expectancy. For a panel of 15 OECD countries, results from using first difference GMM (DIF) and system GMM (SYS) estimators are compared with those from the Han-Phillips (2007) GMM method. The Han-Phillips method avoids both the weak instrument problem of the DIF estimator and the distribution of fixed effects problem of the DIF estimator. It is found that the choice of estimation method affects the outcome of the Granger causality tests. From the preferred Han-Phillips estimator, which has the advantage of being consistent in the presence of highly persistent data, Melanie finds evidence of bi-directional causality from income to life expectancy, and that Granger causality depends on the treatment of time trends shared by the two series.
The Adjudication Committee for the 2007 Award comprised Professor Viv B Hall of Victoria University of Wellington, and Dr Chirok Han of the University of Auckland.
