THINGS YOU LEARN. Back from the academic conference. There were four sessions of undergraduate student papers, many of which were more innovative than most professional papers. A discussant suggested that the pressures of quick publication precluded much development of data sources by working professors, perhaps that's one explanation for the surfeit of Panel Study labor economics today and concentration-and-profits when that was thought to be intellectually sound. Many of the undergraduate students had the presumption that doing economics was equivalent to running regressions. Perhaps. Perhaps not. Perhaps an artifact of the major, where a senior honors thesis often uses basic statistical inference and regression. Perhaps an artifact ot participation. Good set of papers none-the-less. The paper that generated the most faculty interest was one on the compensation of college presidents, which is a sore point with a lot of faculty. [And you thought you were the hothead??!?] One of the faculty papers was rather instructive. We in the mid-majors take pride in evidence that salaries ten to fifteen years out are invariant to institutional prestige [You did have a link to that once, no?] (Yes, but I forgot where.) But university faculty have a stronger preference for sending their kids to the research universities, private or public, or to the private liberal arts' colleges. Perhaps those are the places to go to discover an academic vocation, as well.

There were a number of sessions on the economics of something called "gender," and a lot of empirical papers using "sex" as a proxy for "gender." [Huh?] (Think about your typical college faculty. A number of your colleagues will be biologically male, fine people, and responsible dads. But blowtorches and power tools make them uneasy.) I mentioned this fear to some of my labor economics colleagues there. They admitted I had a point.