Last week, the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association (AAEA)–my professional home–held its 2019 annual meeting in Atlanta, GA. In this post, I wanted to discuss some of my highlights from the meeting.
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Though the meeting was held from July 21 to 23, I arrived in Atlanta on the morning of the 19th to attend the biannual meeting of the executive board of the AAEA, to which I was elected last year. Here are the important things that came out of the board meeting:
- On the journal’s front, the editors of both the American Journal of Agricultural Economics (AJAE) and Applied Economic Perspectives and Policy (AEPP) had good things to report. Among other things, both journals’ impact factors went up in 2018. Both journals will also transition from being published by Oxford University Press to being published by Wiley in the next few months, and the transition is going well.
- Applied Economics Teaching Resources (AETR), the AAEA’s new journal dedicated to teaching, is off to a wonderful start. As another board member put it, editor Jason Bergtold went from 0 to 60 mph in record time. Here is vol. 1, no. 1 of the journal.
- A new journal focused on agricultural and food business will be proposed to Wiley, since this is a space which the AAEA does not currently occupy, and a sizable proportion of the membership works in that area.
- The AAEA will hold an early-career mentoring workshop focusing on research sometime this academic year.
- The Committee on Women in Agricultural Economics (CWAE) and the Committee on the Opportunities and Status of Blacks in Agricultural Economics (COSBAE) will both send out a survey to the membership on issues of concern to their members.
- The AAEA’s new anti-harassment policy and code of conduct are now in effect.
- On the financial front, changes may be coming to the funding model for publishing. Submission fees were discussed, as was the possibility of bringing back page charges for published articles.
- Should you be interested in helping the AAEA Trust grow, there are many opportunities. Among other things, the AAEA has appreciation clubs, which are created to celebrate the contribution of specific individuals to the association. If that is something you are interested in doing, you should get in touch with the business office of the AAEA.
- The AAEA will be working on a new strategic plan over the next year.
- The 2020 annual meeting will be held in Kansas City, and we hope for a big turnout.
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As outgoing chair of the Econometrics section of the AAEA, I had also organized two sessions for that section. The first was titled “The Front-Door Criterion in Theory and in Practice,” and it featured a one-hour talk with Emory University’s Adam Glynn, who wrote two important papers using the front-door criterion (one in AJPS 2017, one in JASA 2018). The second was titled “How Should Econometrics Be Taught?,” and it featured a dialogue between Dave Giles and me, as we respectively argued against and for a cookbook approach to teaching econometrics. Ultimately, there was a lot more agreement than disagreement. Here is Dave’s post on the topic, which also has a link to his slides. (I unfortunately did not have slides, and spoke from notes based on a previous post on the topic.)
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Although we do not officially start until January 1, Amy Ando and I spent a whole day with the remaining editors Terry Hurley and Tim Richards and outgoing editors Tim Beatty and Travis Lybbert of the American Journal of Agricultural Economics. This allowed us to get acquainted with how the AJAE works, and to receive training on the journal’s editorial system.
From what I can see after one week handling manuscripts for the AJAE (I’ve already handled four new submissions), the journal operates along many dimensions differently than what I am used to at Food Policy (e.g., the AJAE does not have an editorial assistant who assigns manuscripts to the relevant editor, and the AJAE’s associate editors do not handle manuscripts).
Speaking of Food Policy, my time as editor of that journal ends tonight at midnight. It has been an instructive, exhilarating, and frustrating (often all four in the span of 24 hours) four years. I’ll likely discuss in a separate post the insights I have gained as co-editor of Food Policy.
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Update: I forgot to mention it in my original post, but the meeting concluded with a two-day early career mentoring workshop organized by the University of Illinois Madhu Khanna, at which I talked in a session titled “Getting Published.” The workshop was very well attended by younger colleagues. The future of agricultural and applied economics is bright!