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WELCOME Welcome to the 2009 meetings of the Eastern Economic Association. Our Program Chair and incoming President-elect, Paul Krugman, our program committee, and our session organizers have done a marvelous job of assembling a program of diverse and interesting panels and special events. I hope you will participate in as many activities as possible. The EEA continues to grow in stature as a respected professional body. Attendance at the annual meetings continues to rise and the Association continues its long-standing tradition of welcoming participants from all views in the discipline. Each year, its President joins a distinguished list of past presidents, and others are following me: the next President, Greg Mankiw, and the current Vice President and incoming President-elect, Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman. We continue to appreciate the involvement of other associations and groups in our program and are happy to welcome back a number of "old friends." Thanks go to Karl Widerquist and the USBIG committee, who again organized the U.S. Basic Income Guarantee Network sessions; to the NYC Computational Economics & Complexity Workshop, with eight sessions organized by Jason Barr, Troy Tassier, and Leanne Ussher; and to Scott Carter for organizing the seven Union for Radical Political Economics (URPE) sessions. Welcome back to the Society for the Development of Austrian Economics (SDAE), whose sessions were organized by Doug MacKenzie, and to the National Association of Forensic Economics (NAFE) whose sessions were organized by David Schap. We thank Mark White for organizing the Association for Social Economics (ASE) sessions; Linda Bell for organizing the Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession (CSWEP) sessions; Rich Torz for organizing the EU-EMU Working Group sessions; Bijou Yang Lester for organizing the Society for the Advancement of Behavioral Economics (SABE) sessions; Michael Szenberg for organizing the Omicron Delta Epsilon session and chapter advisors' breakfast; and Polly Cleveland for organizing the Association for Georgist Studies session. Steve DeLoach, Tina Das and Steve Greenlaw have again organized the sessions featuring undergraduate student research sponsored by Issues in Political Economy (IPE). There are a record number (twelve!) sessions of undergraduate presentations this year. Last, but certainly not least, we acknowledge the tireless efforts of Steve Pressman and Mary Lesser, which literally hold this Association together. Steve’s work continues to improve the EEA’s fiscal position, and Mary and her team at Iona College have worked tirelessly on the myriad arrangements for this conference. As many of you may know, Mary has announced that this will be her last year as Executive Director. We are all indebted to her for many years of service to the Association. As I near the end of my term as President, I look confidently to the EEA’s continued growth and success. I thank you all for your participation and efforts on behalf of the Association. Joseph E. Stiglitz, President