AAEA prepares to celebrate George Judge’s centenary at ASSA 2026 with focus on innovative econometrics
The Agricultural & Applied Economics Association (AAEA) has invited media to attend its sessions at the Allied Social Sciences Association (ASSA) 2026 Annual Meeting in Philadelphia, with a scheduled panel on Sunday, 4 January 2026, titled "George Judge: 100 and Counting. Econometrics in Agricultural and Applied Economics". According to the announcement, the session will run from 8:00–10:00 am (EST) at the Philadelphia Marriott Downtown and is one of several AAEA events taking place across the three‑day conference.
The AAEA said the session will feature presentations by leading academics, including Sofia Villas‑Boas and Gordon Rausser of the University of California‑Berkeley, who are listed as presenters on a paper reviewing George Judge's contributions. The association’s programme also lists papers by Ron C. Mittelhammer, George Judge and Miguel Henry; a team from UC‑Berkeley on treatment effects under dyadic dependence; and a contribution from Amos Golan on information‑ and decision‑theoretic approaches to partial identification. The organizers stated that the media may request complimentary press credentials for AAEA sessions.
The release frames Professor George Garrett Judge’s work as spanning an “intellectually coherent and forward‑looking” research programme, and describes his contributions across Stein‑rule estimation, spatial equilibrium modelling and information‑theoretic inference. External summaries of the paper underpin this characterization, noting Judge’s longstanding influence on econometrics through textbooks, methodological innovations and the application of entropy‑based ideas to recover signal from noisy economic data. The picture painted is of a scholar who reoriented parts of applied econometrics towards prediction, information theory and computational methods.
One of the scheduled presentations is described by its authors as proposing a broadly applicable testing procedure based on differences in differential entropy to assess whether a chosen parametric family generated a given sample. The paper’s authors say the method combines maximum likelihood, bootstrap and kernel density estimation principles and requires minimal tuning from the user. Another paper listed will examine the estimation of average treatment effects when units exhibit dyadic dependence, exploring implications for convergence rates and experimental design. A third contribution contrasts an information‑theoretic decision framework with partial identification approaches, arguing in the abstract that the former can be simpler and may dominate Manski‑style methods under certain conditions. The association’s programme materials provide only abstracts and methodological summaries rather than full empirical results.
AAEA’s wider presence at the ASSA meeting is presented as substantial: the association is hosting multiple invited sessions across subject areas, including international trade, agrifood value chains, wine markets and GLP‑1 food and drug demand, with more than forty experts scheduled to speak. The group has invited the press to any AAEA session and points to complimentary media registration; the broader conference programme confirms the January 3–5 timetable and the Philadelphia Marriott Downtown as the headquarters hotel. External conference listings note registration and preliminary programme details for the overall meeting.
The association’s release reiterates standard background about the AAEA: founded in 1910, the organization says it represents roughly 2,500 members across more than 60 countries and publishes several journals and online resources. The announcement presents the session as both a scholarly commemoration of Judge’s influence and an opportunity for association members to showcase recent methodological advances to a wider economics audience at ASSA.