In a 1966 article in the <em>American Economic Review</em>, Harvey Leibenstein introduced the concept of "X-efficiency": the gap between ideal allocative efficiency and actually existing efficiency. Leibenstein insisted that absent strong competitive pressure, firms are unlikely to use their resources...

The term "consumer sovereignty" is usually traced to William Harold Hutt and his 1936 book Economists and the Public: A Study of Competition and Opinion. Hutt paid only passing attention to the maximization of consumer welfare or the achievement of market efficiency. He was stalking different...

This paper examines Alfred Marshall's invention of the representative firm. Marshall first used the representative firm in order to describe an industry supply curve for an industry with heterogeneous firms. Despite Marshall's limited use of the notion, the representative agent was extensively...

From 1938 to 1950, there was a spirited debate about whether decreasing-average-cost industries should set prices at marginal cost, with attendant subsidies if necessary. In 1938, Harold Hotelling published a forceful and far-reaching proposal for marginal cost pricing entitled "The General...

Roy Radner has been elected a Distinguished Fellow of the American Economic Association. To illustrate the Radner style, I have chosen the example of his turnpike theorem, even though this is not quite illustrative of his central concerns. I shall follow this with a brief survey of his...

This paper summarizes the research contributions of Lawrence Summers, who was awarded the 1993 John Bates Clark Medal by the American Economic Association. It focuses on research in four subfields of economics: public finance, labor economies, financial economies, and macroeconomics. The paper...

The economics of Leon H. Keyserling influenced the Roosevelt era in terms of housing, agriculture, labor, and antitrust legislation. During the Truman era, discussed herein, Keyserling was influential as chair of the Council of Economic Advisors, stressing long-term growth, general and selective...

Trygve Haavelmo was in the United States from 1939 to 1947, and in this period he published most of his path-breaking contributions to econometrics for which the Nobel committee awarded him the prize. His list of publications after 1947 contains more than 100 items. We review his contributions...

Guy Henderson Orcutt, Distinguished Fellow of our Association. has now moved to a new phase of his career (retirement). Most of Guy's career has been at four universities: Michigan, where he earned all three degrees, Harvard, Wisconsin, and Yale. In between, he spent periods at MIT, Cambridge...

This paper describes the contribution of David Card, winner of the John Bates Clark Medal, to economics and the new empiricism that has become such an important part of the profession. Card's forte is creative and careful empirical scholarship that exploits modern computerized data sets with...