Dear MEA participants,

Greetings, and welcome to Chicago for the 90th annual meetings of the Midwest Economic Association!  Once again, we offer a high-quality conference with more than 500 research presentations, including special sessions organized by the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists (AERE), the Committee for the Status of Women in the Economics Profession (CSWEP), and the Society of Labor Economists (SOLE) and many others.

Members from all over the United States and the world are traveling to this year’s meeting to present their research. In addition to distinguished faculty and professionals in the field of economics and business administration, we have papers from many PhD students and five special sessions for undergraduates.

We are honored to host Dr. Justin Wolfers, professor of public policy and economics at the University of Michigan and a visiting professor of economics at the University of Sydney, who will deliver the 2026 C. Woody Thompson Guest Lecture. Wolfers is also a research associate with the National Bureau of Economic Research; a non-resident senior fellow with the Brookings Institution, a non-resident senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, a research fellow with the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) in Bonn; a research affiliate with the Centre for Economic Policy Research in London; an international research fellow with the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, and a fellow of the CESifo, in Munich. He earned his bachelor’s degree in Economics from the University of Sydney, and obtained his PhD in economics from Harvard University. His plenary lecture, “Economics for Humans: A How To Guide for Talking to the General Public,” is on Friday, March 20, at 5:45 pm.

I will deliver the Presidential Address with my lecture titled “Labor Mobility as a Shock Absorber:  Lessons from Europe and the United States” on Saturday, March 21, at 5:45 pm.

The Midwest Economics Association is deeply grateful to the sponsors for this year’s conference: StataCorp LLC, the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, the Economics Departments at the Universities of Minnesota, Wisconsin, Missouri and Notre Dame, the Chicago Booth School of Business, the University of Michigan Ross School of Business, the W.E. Upjohn Institute, and the Loyola University Chicago Quinlan School of Business. The generous financial support of these organizations contributes to the MEA’s mission to promote the advancement of economic knowledge and the economics profession through this annual forum.

I personally want to thank the other officers of the MEA for their help in organizing the conference, First Vice President Paulina Restrepo-Echavarria, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis; Second Vice President Marcus Casey, University of Illinois Chicago; Past President Bhashkar Mazumder, University of California Irvine and President Elect Abigail Wozniak, Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. I am especially grateful to the wonderful team at Grinnell College: MEA Secretary-Treasurer Logan Lee and Managing Secretary Allison Utech. I cannot overstate how valuable their contributions are to the MEA and to these meetings.

Following my lecture on March 21, the MEA will hold its Annual Business Meeting. All current members are invited to attend. At the conclusion of the business meeting, I will turn over my position to President Elect Abigail Wozniak. I have every confidence that Abigail and the rest of next year’s leadership team will oversee another excellent installment of the annual MEA meeting when we assemble in Indianapolis in 2027, for the MEA’s 91st annual meetings.

Warmest regards,
Linda Tesar
MEA President