From today's inbox. I highly recommend that all young scholars submit an abstract. IBL does things right and it is a great experience.

Dear friends,

In the Fall of each year, Istituto Bruno Leoni organizes a Mises Seminar in Sestri Levante, hosting young scholars from many different countries, carefully selected among the many applications submitted.

The Seminar is titled after Ludwig von Mises, the great Austrian economist that tutored Murray Rothbard and several important thinkers and is emerging as a significant event in the cultural life of contemporary classical liberalism, offering a distinguished audience to a few brilliant young libertarian scholars.

IBL will host some young (under-35) researchers. Each scholar or team of scholars will present a paper to be posted on this website a few weeks before the date of the Seminar.

During the Seminar itself, the paper will be briefly presented by their respective authors and commented by a scholar from an academic or a research establishment and, immediately thereafter, will be discussed by the audience.

The Seminar will be held in English and attendance is open to all.

The Eighth Mises Seminar will be held in Sestri Levante (Italy), October 8-9.

The theme discussed will be: Freedom and the Law. Rules and Institutions in a Free-Market Society

The keynote speakers of this year's edition will be
Leszek Balcerowicz
Former Polish Minister of Finances and former Chairman of the Polish Central Bank
and
Vernon L. Smith
Professor of Economics at Chapman University and 2002 Nobel Laureate in Economics

______________________



Call for Papers

Freedom and the Law. Rules and Institutions in a Free-Market Society


We call for young scholars to submit to our attention an essay for the Seminar
The topic can be investigated from the perspective of economics, philosophy, law, sociology, history, economic history.

Authors are invited to submit a proposal of about 500 words, in English to Dr Carlo Lottieri (carlo.lottieri@brunoleoni.it) not later than February 28th, 2011.

IBL will then select the best submissions and inform the candidates accordingly by March 30.
Conference paper (max. lenght 40.000 characters, in English) are to be submitted to IBL by July 1st 2011.

All travel and boarding expenses of the selected authors will be paid for by Istituto Bruno Leoni.

Informations concerning the presentation of papers, registration fees, accomodation and other logistic aspects will be provided later, through IBL’s web-site: www.brunoleoni.it

A brief reminder that the 2010 Policy Communicators Contest is still open to entries.

Basics:
The research question is "How do public policies influence measures of economic performance?". Awards are $15,000 for first prize, $7,500 for second, and $4,000 for third. Top three receive travel money to present their papers at APEE 2010 in Las Vegas. Please visit APEE's conference website for complete details.

New information:
1. The extended deadline for entries is now midnight Pacific time on February 20.

2. The all-star panel of judges has been set: Bruce Yandle and Ben Powell are the headliners; this guy (me) brings up the rear.

3. Feel free to get in touch with me with any questions.

Open to full professors with 5+ years administrative experience. Requires five letters of recommendation. Deadeline January 14, 2010.
Full listing here.

How do public policies influence measures of economic performance?

That is the general topic for the brand new (and big payout!) Policy Communicators Contest that we will be conducting in advance of APEE 2010.

The 2010 Policy Communicators Contest invites college professors and graduate students from all disciplines to submit essays on the relationship between public policy and economic growth. It is of particular interest to compare and contrast individual countries, states, regions or major metro areas—why some are succeeding and others are failing....

First Prize: $15,000
Second Prize: $7,500
Third Prize: $4,000

Deadline is February 13. Graduate students and faculty of all ranks are invited to apply. For complete details and entry guidelines, here is the announcement. You can call or email me with questions.

DOLers are happy to welcome Noel Campbell to our merry band of bloggers. Noel is a George Mason economics Ph.D. (like me, only he finished a month later!). He is now at University of Central Arkansas and he has built up an impressive body of work in public finance, public choice, entrepreneurship, and related areas. He's also an associate editor of the Southern Journal of Entrepreneurship. Welcome aboard, Noel!

I was happy to find DoL listed (at 68) on this list of Top 100 Academic Blogs Every Professional Investor Should Read, but the description was puzzling:

68. Division of Labour: The Division of Labour features historical economic headlines, ads, and more.

"Historical economic headlines" no doubt refers to Craig's NYT series.

But ads?

Students Matt Ryan (West Virginia U.) and David Skarbek (San Jose St. U.) have started a blog, The Perfect Substitute. Check it out. I love the tag line:

The case where a consumer is willing to substitute one good for another at some constant rate and remain equally well off. This blog is that perfect substitute.

First and somewhat belatedly, I want to welcome Brad Smith to the DoL fold. Brad is my friend and colleague at Capital University (he's in the law school) and as regular readers know is John McCain's favorite former Federal Election Commissioner.

Re: Brad's questioning of the value of academic conferences. The only value of the conferences is in the networking. There never was much point to the paper sessions even less so in this internet age. But you still can't network effectively by the internet. I was drinking networking until the wee hours of the morning in fact.

Somewhat belatedly, I'd like to welcome Tim Shaughnessy to the DoL fold. Tim is an econ prof at LSU-Shreveport. He went to a great graduate school for his doctorate. Go 'Noles!

I imagine there will be light blogging from the DoL crew this weekend and early next week as several of us will be attending the Association of Private Enterprise Education meeting in Orlando from Sunday-Tuesday. This includes myself (I'm the APEE President this year), Frank, Josh and Larry. The hotel does have wi-fi so I may get out a post or two.

This begs the question: What the heck are Mike, Ralph and Craig doing not going to the APEE meeting? I say next year we ALL go. Mark your calendars: April 2-4, 2006 in Las Vegas.

Thanks to the pointer provided by Marginal Revolution, Division of Labour now has its very own favicon--a favicon is the little image that appears on your web address bar.

Mozilla Firefox should show it right away, but if you use IE you'll probably need to drag the old favicon (the standard IE image) a couple of times to make the new one show up.