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Economists have a tendency to associate “free trade agreements” all too closely with “free trade.” They may be unaware of some of the new (and often problematic) beyond-the-boarder features of current trade agreements. As trade agreements have evolved and gone beyond import tariffs and quotas into regulatory rules and harmonization— intellectual property, health and safety rules, labor standards, investment measures, investor–state dispute settlement procedures, and others—they have become harder to fit into received economic theory. It is possible that rather than neutralizing the protectionists, trade agreements may empower a different set of rent-seeking interests and politically well-connected firms—international banks, pharmaceutical companies, and multinational firms. Trade agreements could still result in freer, mutually beneficial trade, through exchange of market access. They could result in the global upgrading of regulations and standards, for labor, say, or the environment. But they could also produce purely redistributive outcomes under the guise of “freer trade.” As trade agreements become less about tariffs and nontariff barriers at the border and more about domestic rules and regulations, economists might do well to worry more about the latter possibility.

As economists increasingly help governments design new policies and regulations, they take on an added responsibility to engage with the details of policy making and, in doing so, to adopt the mindset of a plumber. Plumbers try to predict as well as possible what may work in the real world, mindful that tinkering and adjusting will be necessary since our models gives us very little theoretical guidance on what (and how) details will matter. This essay argues that economists should seriously engage with plumbing, in the interest of both society and our discipline.

Matthews interviews eminent international economist Anne O. Krueger, tracing her life in academia and her service at multilateral economic institutions, and explaining her myriad intellectual contributions to the field. Krueger recounts her early skepticism of import substitution, informed by her experiences in Turkey and India, culminating in her influential 1974 paper on rent-seeking. Krueger discusses her tenure at the World Bank in the 1980s and her time at the IMF in the 2000s, where she influenced the fund's response to the financial crisis in Argentina. She also explains her career-long interest in trade liberalization efforts, her concerns about the decline of the World Trade Organization and multilateral trade negotiations, and her skepticism about the United States' recent turn toward industrial policy. Krueger ends by reflecting on the evolution of the economics profession and offering advice for young economists.

The economics profession includes disproportionately few women and members of historically underrepresented racial and ethnic minority groups, relative both to the overall population and to other academic disciplines. This underrepresentation within the field of economics is present at the undergraduate level, continues into the ranks of the academy, and is barely improving over time. It likely hampers the discipline, constraining the range of issues addressed and limiting our collective ability to understand familiar issues from new and innovative perspectives. In this paper, we first present data on the numbers of women and underrepresented minority groups in the profession. We then offer an overview of current research on the reasons for the underrepresentation, highlighting evidence that may be less familiar to economists. We argue that implicit attitudes and institutional practices may be contributing to the underrepresentation of women and minorities at all stages of the pipeline, calling for new types of research and initiatives to attack the problem. We then review evidence on how diversity affects productivity and propose remedial interventions as well as findings on effectiveness. We identify several promising practices, programs, and areas for future research.

The 2024 John Bates Clark Medal of the American Economic Association was awarded to Philipp Strack, Professor of Economics at Yale University, for his pathbreaking contributions to the study of individual decision making, which have introduced new techniques, improved our understanding of important economic phenomena, and helped spark a new wave of research on the economics of information while building bridges between modern economic theory and a wide range of adjacent disciplines. This article summarizes some of Philipp’s papers, and explains how they build on and improve previous work.