American Economic Association May Revamp Ethical Guidelines - WSJ.com.
Amid criticism that academic economists' ethical lapses were partly to blame for the U.S. financial crisis, the American Economic Association said Thursday that it will consider providing new ethical guidelines to its membership.
"The executive committee of the American Economic Association voted unanimously to create a committee to consider the association's existing disclosure and other ethical standards and potential extensions to those standards," the AEA said in a statement here as its annual meeting opened.
The AEA's effort comes as economists face greater scrutiny for their ties to Wall Street banks, hedge funds and other firms. The documentary film "Inside Job," released in October in the U.S., drew widespread public attention to influential academic economists' ties to Wall Street firms through directorships and consulting jobs.
In a recent paper, two economists from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst — Gerald Epstein and Jessica Carrick-Hagenbarth — noted that a number of economists who published comments on financial reforms failed to fully disclose potential conflicts of interest.
This week, Mr. Epstein and Ms. Carrick-Hagenbarth sent a letter, signed by about other 300 economists, to AEA President Robert Hall. It urged the association to "adopt a code of ethics that requires disclosure of potential conflicts of interest that can arise between economists' roles as economic experts and as paid consultants, principals or agents for private firms."
"I think there are many economists who are just as concerned about the issues of disclosure and ethical standards as people outside the profession," said Janet Currie, a Columbia University economist who is a member of the AEA's executive committee.
The AEA has considered adopting ethical guidelines in the past, but decided against it on the grounds that they would not be enforceable. Other than academic journals it publishes, the association exercises no real authority over economists' professional lives, said Harvard economist Lawrence Katz.
"I think the AEA can play a leadership role, but I don't think it can moderate people in any way," he said. That will be a role that the universities that employ the economists will have to take, he added.
Write to Justin Lahart at just[email protected] and Mark Whitehouse at [email protected]
If you've not seen the film yet, I commend it to your attention. But you're probably going to have to live in a town with an independent film house to see it in a theater. Interestingly, it is being distributed by Sony Classics. Spend a bit of time exploring the website, at http://www.sonyclassics.com/insidejob/
It contains priceless scenes of people -- academic economists, including the deans of prestigious universities, who have made awesome sums from private "industry" -- who couldn't imagine ever being embarrassed by anyone for lending their prestige and the prestige of their institutions, including Columbia University -- starting to "get it" that perhaps some ordinary Americans might feel they'd done something wrong, and had reaped huge bonuses from the folks who screwed the ordinary folks.
Watch it, too, for Eliot Spitzer's interviews; they turn out to be eloquent and telling, not about Spitzer but about Wall Street.
Even the music is well chosen!
IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1645089/
Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inside_Job_%28film%29
I wonder what, if anything, the current AEA code of ethics says.
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