By William K. Black
Quito: April 24, 2015
I met N. Gregory Mankiw for the first and only time in 1993 when he was a discussant for George Akerlof and Paul Romer’s paper on “Looting: The Economic Underworld of Bankruptcy for Profit.” The meeting was at Brookings, so it was attended by a wide range of economists. Brooking was by that time working closely with AEI on an anti-regulatory agenda, particularly in finance. Those of us old enough to recall when Brookings was referred to under Republican administrations as “the Democratic Party in exile” are very old. I attended as Akerlof and Romer’s specially invited guest because of my contributions to their article. The meeting taught me a great deal about Mankiw and the state of the economics academy.
