Announcements.

The results of the Southern Economic Association elections were announced at the annual meeting held in November 2006 in Charleston, South Carolina. The new officers are:

President-Elect: James D. Gwartney, Florida State University 

Vice-President: Bruce Caldwell, University of North Carolina--Greensboro (two-year term)

Board of Trustees: Amy Farmer, University of Arkansas (four-year term)

The Southern Economic Association Nominating Committee members for the 2006 slate of officers are:

Eugenia Toma (Chair), University of Kentucky ([e-mail])

Mark Isaac, Florida State University (misaac@mailer. fsu.edu)

Kent P. Kimbrough, Duke University (kent@econ. duke.edu).

Georgescu-Roegen Prize in Economics

The annual Georgescu-Roegen Prize in Economics was awarded to Cagatay Koc, Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Texas at Arlington, on November 20, 2006, at the annual meeting of the SEA. The award is given to the author or authors of the article selected by the prize committee as the best to appear in the Southern Economic Journal in the previous volume year. This year's winner is "Health-Specific Moral Hazard Effects" by Cagatay Koc. This article appeared in the July 2005 issue, Volume 72, Number 1.

The paper examines the stimulative effect of health insurance on expenditures by dividing expenditures into two categories--additional spending on primary care when healthy and additional spending on acute care when sick. The latter effect is a result of the positive income effect from transferring income to the ill state. To the extent that the latter effect dominates the former in magnitude, health insurance is potentially welfare-improving. The author uses sophisticated econometric analysis to deal with endogeneity issues and with count data. The main analysis uses a Tobit model with endogenous regime switching. Moral hazard effects in both health states are important, but the types of expenditures differ across health states. One policy implication is that careful targeting in health insurance plans could lead to large efficiency gains.

The selection committee granted an honorable mention to "Labor Market Implications of Weak Ties" (January 2006, Volume 72, Number 3) by Troy Tassier, Assistant Professor of Economics at Fordham University. This paper on the boundary of economics and sociology tests the theory that people with more acquaintances benefit in the labor market from their larger social networks. These "weak ties" have been found important for finding employment. However, they have not had much effect on earned income in existing literature. Previous work asked if weak ties led to better jobs than other sources of ob information--but that's not the right question. The right one is: Do people with more weak ties do better in the labor market? Using a survey on social networks, where income is reported in categories, an ordered probit analysis finds that acquaintances have a positive effect on income while close friends do not.

Kenneth G. Elzinga Distinguished Teaching Award

The Southern Economic Association has decided to honor annually one or more faculty members for outstanding contributions to economic instruction on their campus and beyond by conferring upon them the Kenneth G. Elzinga Distinguished Teaching award. The Award was instituted by the Board of Trustees of the Southern Economic Association in the fall of 2002.

A letter soliciting nominations from the members of the Southern Economic Association circulated early in October 2006 from the Board of Trustees. Members were encouraged to submit a letter to the Board spelling out the candidate's special attributes and accomplishments as an economic educator. A committee of the Board reviewed the nominations prior to the annual meeting of the organization in November 2006 and selected three individuals to honor.

Professor Stephen Buckles (Vanderbilt University) is an exemplary teacher at all levels of the undergraduate curriculum, from the large lecture in the introductory courses to the small seminar for seniors. He has won awards for teaching and for service to economic education. In addition to being an excellent teacher, he is an innovator in classroom techniques and a promoter of improvements in the assessment of student learning. His forthcoming textbook for the introductory course promotes a novel approach for a first course. He has published numerous essays on topics in the teaching of economics, spanning 30 years, and he has served on the editorial board of the Journal of Economic Education for over a decade. He led the National Council for Economic Education from 1989 to 1994, a non-profit organization that promotes improvement in teaching economics. He chaired the College Board's first Economics Advanced Placement Committee and led the effort to include economics in the National Assessment of Educational Progress 

Buckles won several prizes for teaching at the University of Missouri, and a Choice Award for teaching at Vanderbilt. In 1998, the National Council on Economic Education recognized him with its William A. Forbes Award and again in 2002, with its Marvin Bower award, recognizing his activities in national economic assessment, national standards, and international economic education programs.

Professor Sheryl Ball (Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University) has a long record of teaching effectiveness, both in the classroom and in developing methods to improve instruction. In her tenure at Virginia Tech, she has developed numerous new courses, both within the economics department and interdisciplinary courses in the School of Business and with the School of Engineering. She supervises numerous undergraduate research projects each year, and her teaching evaluations--both from students and peers--are uniformly excellent.

Ball has also devoted an enormous amount of time and energy to developing new ways to incorporate interactive exercises and classroom experiments into a range of courses. Her most notable achievement in this area is her development (with Catherine Eckel and Scott Midkiff) of an innovative system that allows for complex computer-aided experiments in ordinary classrooms. Using this technology, an instructor can run experiments in even large classes without the effort and confusion that come with "paper based" classroom experiments. Ball and her co-investigators have received funding from both the Mellon Foundation and the National Science Foundation to continue developing this system. For these efforts, Ball was a co-recipient of Virginia Tech's Xcaliber award in 2005, which recognizes outstanding uses of technology to improve instruction.

Professor Russell Sobel (West Virginia University) is an outstanding classroom teacher. Since coming to West Virginia in 1994, he has won eight teaching awards in the College of Business and Economics. Part of the reason for success in large lecture sections at WVU is his development of a "walkie-talkie" approach that allows students to control the pace of his presentation by asking him to pause during his lectures. Sobel spends considerable time thinking about effective economic education in part because he is co-author (with James Gwartney, Richard Stroup, and David MacPherson) of the widely used principles textbook Economics: Private and Public Choice.

In addition to undergraduate instruction, Sobel teaches a graduate public finance class in which students are required to write a series of papers. Notably, over a dozen of the papers written for this class have been published in leading academic journals. Sobel cares very deeply about teaching basic economic principles to everyone, not just business and economics students. He has developed and teaches a class for K-12 teachers every summer that exposes them to the basic principles of economics.