The American Economic Review May 1976 [antikvár]

Editors' Introduction This volume contains the papers and proceedings of the eighty-eighth annual meeting of the American Economic Association. "Proceedings" concern the business activities of the Association—the annual membership meeting, the twice yearly meetings of the Executive Committee, and reports of various Association officers and committees—and, as with the "Notes" section in each issue of the American Economic Review, are published in the hope that members will be informed of, and will participate in, the Association's affairs. The "Papers," which constitute the greater part of this volume, are roughly equivalent to two regular issues of the American Economic Review, but are published under quite different procedures. About a year in advance, the Association's President-elect (in 1975 Franco Modigliani, in 1976 Lawrence R. Klein) sets in motion the process which culminates in the presentation at the annual meetings and publication of the papers. After consultation and comments, both volunteered and solicited, from a wide range of persons, the President-elect decides on the topics of sessions at which papers will be presented, sets limits on the length of papers and invites persons to organize these sessions. Each session organizer in turn invites, again after consultation, several persons (usually two or three in number) to give papers on the topic of the session in question, and asks others to give comments on the papers. The papers, or rought drafts, are supposed to be sent to the editors of the Papers and Proceedings a month and a half before the meetings; we check them and where appropriate send the authors comments and suggestions. The papers and comments are read at the Association's meetings; we ask the authors to send us the final versions of their papers within three days. After giving the final versions further scrutiny, we then in almost all cases send them to the printer to be published. We do not generally publish discussants' comments, however, unless there is some special reason to do so. Thus, the rules under which these papers are published are quite different from those concerning articles appearing in regular issues of the Review. Most of the papers published here are invited, not contributed; except in unusual circumstances they must be less than 4,000 (and sometimes 3,000 or even 2,000) words in length; each author is asked to avoid highly technical discussion and instead to contribute a paper which will be intelligible to economists not specializing in the subject it discusses. While we do edit (sometimes extensively) most papers to improve content and style and