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 (pub702@uky.edu)

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...