President's Report (2005)
Econometrica, Vol. 74, No. 6 (November, 2006), 1735–1736
THE ECONOMETRIC SOCIETY ANNUAL REPORTS, 2005 REPORT OF THE PRESIDENT
1. REORGANIZATION
FROM 1975 TO 2005, JULIE AND ROBERT J. GORDON ably administered the Economet- ric Society from offices located in the Economics Department at Northwestern Uni- versity. Julie Gordon served as secretary and also as executive director while Robert J. Gordon served as Treasurer. I had the good luck to be president when Bob and Julie were still serving the Society. I often asked them for advice. They freely shared with me a remarkable body of knowledge gleaned from their memories of 30 years of Execu- tive Committee meetings and from understandings of which decisions had worked and which had not. It was easy to be president because Bob and Julie were always there to back me up. I sincerely thank both of them for the many things they did to build the Society for thirty years and for helping me so much during 2005.
In 2003 Bob and Julie informed us that they wished to retire from their positions at the end of 2005. We used the two years lead time that they gave us to consider how the society should be managed on a day to day basis after 2005. At our Executive Commit- tee meeting in August 2004, we asked Rafael Repullo to serve for a five-year term of Executive Vice President of the Econometric Society, an office that among other things is to combine the previous responsibilities of the Constitutional positions of Secretary and Treasurer, as well as some of Julie’s previous role as Executive Director. Rafael was elected to a five-year term by the Fellows of the Society on the 2005 ballot.
From January 2006 the administrative headquarters of the Econometric Society is to be housed in the Economics Department of New York University. We thank North- western University for providing free space during the 30 years that the Society was housed there. We are very grateful to Mark Gertler, then Chair of the NYU Economics Department, for arranging the Society’s new home at NYU.
In mid-summer 2005, Rafael, Bob, and others interviewed candidates to take over the remaining office responsibilities of the Society, including Julie’s remaining duties and those of the administrative assistant who had worked for Julie. The Executive Com- mittee appointed Claire Sashi to fill the newly created position of the General Manager of the Society in time for her and Rafael to attend the annual meeting of the Execu- tive Committee during the London World Congress in August of 2005. The process of cleaning the Society’s files and moving them from Northwestern to NYU took much time during the winter of 2005–2006, a process that was completed by early spring of 2006.
