Announcements.

• Position: Southern Economic Association

News Note

The results of the Southern Economic Association elections were announced at the SEA meeting in San Antonio, Texas in November 2003. The new officers are:

President-Elect: William E. Johnson, University of Virginia

Vice President: Edgar G. Olsen, University of Virginia (two-year term)

Board of Trustees: Douglas D. Davis, Virginia Commonwealth University (four-year term).

The Southern Economic Association Nominating Committee members for the 2005 slate of officers are:

Marjorie B. McElroy (chair), Duke University (mcelroy@ econ.duke.edu)

Kathryn Anderson, Vanderbilt University (kathryn. anderson@vanderbilt.edu)

Steve G. Craig, University of Houston (SCraig@uh.edu)

Georgescu-Roegen Prize in Economics

The annual Georgescu-Roegen Prize in Economics was awarded to Rachel Connelly of Bowdoin College and Jean Kimmel of Western Michigan University on November 23, 2003, at the annual meetings of the Southern Economic Association in San Antonio, Texas.

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 "The Effect of Child Care Costs on the Employment and Welfare Recipiency of Single Mothers" by Rachel Connelly and Jean Kimmel. This article appeared in the January 2003 issue, Volume 69, Number 3.

The Connelly-Kimmel article addresses an important issue with a mix of theory, careful econometric analysis, and reasoned policy inference. Their paper examines the effects of child care costs on employment and welfare recipiency among single mothers. The authors use child care expenditure data drawn from 1991-93 SIPP panels. They find that single mothers facing high child care costs are less likely to be employed in 1994 and more likely to receive welfare. Connelly and Kimmel carefully take into account theoretical and econometric issues prior to inferring causality or drawing policy implications. These include the presence of censored data on child care costs, kinks in the budget constraint owing to AFDC regulations and non-continuous hours choices, and the joint determination of welfare recipiency and employment. The authors treat each of these concerns in a convincing manner, in the end concluding that the likelihood of both welfare recipiency and employment are sensitive to differences in child care costs. The authors use their results to simulate the effects of alternative policies, concluding that...