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We attempted to replicate 67 macroeconomic papers using author-provided data and code files by following a preanalysis plan. Excluding 6 papers that used confidential data, we obtained data and code replication files for 29 of 35 papers (83 percent) that were required to provide such files as a condition of publication, compared to 11 of 26 papers (42 percent) that were not required to provide such files. Also excluding the 2 papers that used software we did not possess, we replicated 29 of 59 papers (49 percent) with assistance from the authors. We conclude with recommendations on improving replication of economics research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We assess the rate of replication for empirical papers in the 2010 American Economic Review. Across 70 empirical papers, we find that 29 percent have 1 or more citation that partially replicates the original result. While only a minority of papers has a published replication, a majority (60 percent) have either a replication, robustness test, or an extension. Surveying authors within the literature, we find substantial uncertainty over the number of extant replications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Understanding how prior outcomes affect risk attitudes is critical for the study of choice under uncertainty. A large literature documents the significant influence of prior losses on risk attitudes. The findings appear contradictory: some studies find greater risk- taking after a loss, whereas others show the opposite--that people take on less risk. I reconcile these seemingly inconsistent findings by distinguishing between realized versus paper losses. Using new and existing data, I replicate prior findings and demonstrate that following a realized loss, individuals avoid risk; if the same loss is not realized, a paper loss, individuals take on greater risk. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I examine replications of empirical papers in development economics published in the top-5 and next-5 general interest journals between the years 2000 through 2015. Of the 1,138 empirical papers, 71 papers (6.2 percent) were replicated in another published paper or working paper. The majority (77.5 percent) of replications involved reanalysis of the data using different econometric specifications to assess robustness. The strongest predictor of whether a paper is replicated or not is the paper's Google Scholar citation count, followed by year of publication. Papers based on randomized control trials (RCTs) appear to be replicated at a higher rate (12.5 percent). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses the relationship between foreign exchange rates and internal prices. Experiences of England, Sweden and Argentina under inconvertible paper currencies; Controversy arising from the practice of comparing only the absolute movements of foreign exchange rates and internal prices; Modifications of the theoretical conclusions which are based largely on the war and post-war inconvertible currency experiences.

Drastic changes in central bank operations and monetary institutions in recent years have made previously standard approaches to explaining the determination of the price level obsolete. Recent expansions of central bank balance sheets and of the levels of richcountry sovereign debt, as well as the evolving political economy of the European Monetary Union, have made it clear that fiscal policy and monetary policy are intertwined. Our thinking and teaching about inflation, monetary policy, and fiscal policy should be based on models that recognize fiscal-monetary policy interactions. (JEL E31, E52, E58, E62, H63) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines whether and how market competition affected the political bias of government-owned newspapers in China from 1981 to 2011. We measure media bias based on coverage of government mouthpiece content (propaganda) relative to commercial content. We first find that a reform that forced newspaper exits (reduced competition) affected media bias by increasing product specialization, with some papers focusing on propaganda and others on commercial content. Second, lower-level governments produce less-biased content and launch commercial newspapers earlier, eroding higher-level governments’ political goals. Third, bottom-up competition intensifies the politico-economic trade-off, leading to product proliferation and less audience exposure to propaganda. (JEL D72, L31, L82, O14, O17, P26, P31) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Papermaking apparently originated in China about two centuries before the Christian Era. Arabs learned the art in the eighth century and diffused it along North Africa, whence it spread into Spain in the twelfth century, into Italy in the thirteenth, and into France either near the beginning or near the middle of the fourteenth century. Around 1700 the French economy was in the middle of a protracted period of stagnation, and the paper industry was especially depressed. Several intendants stated at that time that papermaking had greatly declined over the past two decades, and the newly established Council of Trade learned from the survey it ordered in 1701 that the number of active mills was everywhere much smaller than formerly. Most of the evidence the author has sketched in this article reveals a direct correlation between the industry's expansion and the relaxation of direct governmental controls in France. After recovering from a long period of depression at the end of the seventeenth century, papermaking perhaps doubled its output between 1720 and 1789, with most of the growth coming after 1750.

How is credit for group work allocated when individual contributions are not observed? I use data on academics' publication records to test whether demographic traits like gender influence how credit is allocated under such uncertainty. While solo-authored papers send a clear signal about ability, coauthored papers are noisy, providing no specific information about each contributor's skills. I find that men are tenured at roughly the same rate regardless of coauthoring choices. Women, however, are less likely to receive tenure the more they coauthor. The result is much less pronounced among women who coauthor with other women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We make a two-pronged proposal to (i) strengthen the incentives for replication work and (ii) better organize and draw attention to the replications that are conducted. First we propose that top journals publish short 'replication reports.' These reports could summarize novel work replicating an existing high-impact paper, or they could highlight a replication result embedded in a wider-scope published paper. Second, we suggest incentivizing replications with the currency of our profession: citations. Enforcing a norm of citing replication work alongside the original would provide incentives for replications to both authors and journals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine the evolution of economics research using a machine-learning-based classification of publications into fields and styles. The changing field distribution of publications would not seem to favor empirical papers. But economics' empirical shift is a within-field phenomenon; even fields that traditionally emphasize theory have gotten more empirical. Empirical work has also come to be more cited than theoretical work. The citation shift is sharpened when citations are weighted by journal importance. Regression analyses of citations per paper show empirical publications reaching citation parity with theoretical publications around 2000. Within fields and journals, however, empirical work is now cited more. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the issuance of paper money by Pennsylvania when it was an English Colony. Pennsylvania was successful at issuing paper money with a minimal effect on prices to an extent that it is sometimes said to violate the classical quantity theory of money. The paper contends that new paper issues of money were absorbed without inflation because they encouraged more transactions to be made using money, due to it being more efficient for transactions than barter or bookkeeping. It tries to explain fixed rates in colonial Pennsylvania despite the lack of specie by considering the model of economists Thomas J. Sargent and Neil Wallace that money issues, if backed by "real bills," are not necessarily inflationary.

Farley W. Grubb's recent papers on the early U.S. monetary system would be important contributions to the common currency area literature were not most of their historical assertions questionable and their key assumption--that the medium of exchange can be inferred from the unit of account--dubious. We contend that after 1781 most Americans eschewed government paper money in favor of fullbodied coins and convertible bank liabilities and that, contrary to Grubb's claim, bankers did not foist the constitutional clause banning state emissions onto an unsuspecting public. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The desirability of politically creating currency unions among otherwise sovereign states is an ongoing debate. The benefits of the U.S. currency union and the benefits of other politically manufactured currency unions are assumed to be obvious, namely a reduction in monetary instability and exchange rate transaction costs within the union thereby stimulating long-run economic growth. Price indices, exchange rates and market-generated transaction data from 1748 through 1811 are used to determine when the market moved from state currencies to the U.S. dollar and to assess the non-wartime performance of prices, exchange rates, and purchasing power parity before versus this transition. The British North American colonies were the first modern western economies to experiment with large-scale government issuance of flat paper money. Colonial legislatures backed their paper money by linking it not to specie but to future taxes and mortgage payments designed to withdraw it from circulation in a timely fashion. The only continuous data for evaluating colonial/state monetary performance are price indices. Stability of prices is the hallmark of a well-managed monetary regime. New issues of state currency were constitutionally prohibited after 1787 and enough old state currency would be taken out of circulation through tax redemption by the early 1790s that the paper-money medium fell to banknotes by default.

In the recent article "The Cyclical Turning Points in an Open Economy: Canada, 1927-1939," published in September 1953 issue of the journal "American Economic Review," author Edward Marcus has argued that in both 1929 and 1937 the Canadian downturn preceded the downturn in Canada's two principal markets, Great Britain and the U.S. In both years he attributes this to: a deflationary influence arising out of two of Canada's important export industries, wheat and pulp and paper. The author argues that he cannot agree. In his view, the downturn in 1937 came later in Canada than in the United States and in 1929 there is no clear evidence of either a lead or a lag. Furthermore, he doesn't believe that either wheat or pulp and paper exerted an important deflationary influence prior to the U.S. downturn in these two years. As evidence of the early downturn in 1929 Marcus cites first the decline in bank debits in the second quarter of 1929 below their level in the same quarter of 1928. He fails to mention their substantial recovery later in the year. His statement that newsprint exports were below their level of the previous year is wrong. Canadian exports of newsprint exceeded their level for 1928 in every month in 1929 except February.

An introduction is presented in which the editors note that the current issue offers papers and proceedings from the American Economic Association's January 2015 annual meeting, outline how the papers were selected, and offers thanks to many who helped in the preparation of the issue.

A paper on the impact of the health status of infants on subsequent income inequality and socioeconomic conditions during their lives is presented. Economics research indicating that birth weight is affected by a wide range of factors including environmental conditions, health behavior of mothers and nutrition during pregnancy is considered. Research finding a strong correlation between birth weight and future lifetime earnings is discussed.

Presents schedules and activities during the Fourth Congress of the International Economic Association in Budapest, Hungary.

Can the well-known experimental phenomenon of present-bias in intertemporal choice be confounded with the risks associated with receiving payment? Can measurements of risk preferences be used to represent desires for smoothness in intertemporal payments? In our two 2012 papers in this journal we explored these two questions and found the answer to the first to be yes and the second to be no. We feel the three papers inspired by our work and published here underscore these arguments and point to interesting new possibilities for modeling and measuring risk over time. (JEL C91, D81, D91) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author draws attention to the almost contemporaneous contribution of Marvin Frankel (1962), 'The Production Function in Allocation and Growth: A Synthesis.' The author feels that Frankel's paper anticipates ideas in use in the modern literature and deserves wider recognition. However, it has lain unnoticed for the last 26 years, despite being published in this journal. Subsequently, the author asks why Frankel's paper attracted so little attention at the time and why it has remained in obscurity for so long.

This article presents the author's view on George Stigler's paper debunking the effects of economic conditions on electoral results in the United States. I view Stigler's paper as a healthy antidote to conventional wisdom and a refreshing contrast to the frequent practice of computer-users of running regressions until they find something significant. Nonetheless, I believe there is more to the relation between voting behavior and general economic conditions than meets the jaundiced eye, and I am particularly concerned that Stigler's criticisms should be correctly interpreted as dropping the gauntlet--and not a wet blanket--on research in this area. I do not share his negative presumptions about the satisficing model in general or its applicability to voting behavior in particular. To use his example of a 3 percentage point increase in the unemployment rate, it tells us far more than the extra number of people unemployed at a moment of time. It also means that an extra 12 percent of all adult male workers will have experienced some costly spell of unemployment within the preceding year. Without a reliable theoretical guide, the specification of favorable economic conditions becomes a matter of hunch and taste. In the final section of his paper, Stigler sets forth as an alternative a long-memory model of how macroeconomic performance might influence voters. Unlike the Kramer satisficing voter who sees the two parties only as ins and outs, the Stigler long-memory voter has a definite perception of Republicans and Democrats.

The article discusses researches conducted by economists Paul A. David, Warren J. Scoville and Earl J. Hamilton. Researcher Stanley Engerman in his discussion on David's article suggests that his article represents the most thorough study in the debate concerning American economic growth between 1800 and 1840. It is based both on new time series not previously utilized and upon the resourceful application of available data to clarify certain key points. Another researcher Ross M. Robertson while discussing Scoville's article finds his article on the whole persuasive. Robertson certainly has no quarrel with his quantitative inferences, nor for that matter with his description of French governmental regulation in the eighteenth century. He was not altogether convinced of the direct correlation between the paper industry's expansion and the relaxation of direct governmental controls that Scoville alleges. Perhaps Scoville's more extended publications on this subject will elucidate this relationship.

This article focuses on papers discussed at the round table meeting on "the teaching of elementary economics" on December 30, 1949, at New York. Since the movement toward a general course in the social sciences seems to one essential it would be useful at this stage to collate the experiences of the hundred institutions now engaged in offering such a course. Fortunately both the American Economic Association and the American Political Science Association are engaged in a survey of this field by questionnaire and interviews. It is already clear, however, that the general course can be expected to follow no set formula. Its content and emphasis will vary from college to college with the abilities, interests, and philosophies of the staff members, and with the financial resources of the institution. One do not consider such diversity unfortunate. It is fragmentation and compartmentalization which are making the teaching of the social sciences increasingly ineffective in the light of social integration today. The closest integration will continue to recognize the infinite diversity contained in the fundamental unity of society.

Since the outbreak of the European war, the flow of rupee coins back from circulation to reserves, which has been going on for many years, has been reversed. The stock of rupee coin in the Reserve Bank of India has decreased, while circulation has increased, between September 1939 and July 1940. This increase of coin circulation has been due partly to the proportional increase of note circulation and to some tendency to hoard coins in preference to notes. To avoid exhaustion of the Reserve Bank's supply of coin, the government of India began the issuance of 1-rupee notes. In December 1940, it announced a reduction in the fineness of the rupee from 11/12 to 0.300. It remains to be seen whether this section will be acceptable to the population.

In discussing the adequacy of different international monetary mechanisms under varying circumstances, it seems desirable to begin with some analysis of the logical extremes. The extremes are fixed exchanges maintained by transfer of means of payment between the national monetary systems and flexible exchanges without international transfer of money. The gold standard would be an example of the first type of mechanism and the paper standard of the second, provided that both were entirely automatic. In these extreme cases there would be no money management, externally or internally. The object of both systems is to achieve and maintain equilibrium of external-internal trade. For this purpose both systems provide a balancing or compensatory mechanism by which economic change sets in motion forces of correction which restore equilibrium of external-internal trade. The gold standard system works through variation of internal prices and incomes relative to export-import prices, and the paper standard system through variation of the prices of exports and imports.

The article presents information about the program of the American Economic Association Meeting. In programs of the annual meetings of the American Economic Association for the five years 1950-54, persons from the economics departments of fifteen academic institutions delivered 114 out of a total of 210 papers, or 54.3 percent. When papers delivered by people outside the academic field are excluded it is found that of 156 papers originating in colleges and universities these fifteen institutions were responsible for 73.1 percent. Only a few organizations outside the academic field were able to reach the more than two papers category. There was a substantial amount of duplication by individuals from "big 15" universities. Sixteen persons delivered two or more papers, accounting for a total of 37 of 161 papers originating in colleges and universities. These sixteen scholars also served as discussants 6 times. Two of them delivered as many as four papers each in five years, full staffs of only eleven colleges and universities did as well or better.

The article presents a report of the editor for the peer-reviewed economic publication "American Economic Journal: Applied Economics" (AEJ: Applied). Topics include the topics and subject areas of the journal, such as development microeconomics and empirical corporate finance; editorial procedures, such as the submission process and the cessation of the double-blind process; and a list of tables documenting editorial data ending in 2011, including the number of manuscripts submitted and published, average page lengths, and subject matter of published manuscripts.

This paper reviews events in the plain paper copier (PPC) market immediately after Xerox's monopoly ended. Xerox's behavior and that of a flood of PPC entrants are viewed through the lens of recent advances in the theory of entry and entry deterrence. The events of the early post-entry period also cast some interesting light on the theory of technological competition. Xerox did three things which form the basis for investigation: it price discriminated, priced far from costs, and patented every imaginable feature of the copier technology. The early entrants in early 1970's and the effects of the FTC consent decree requiring Xerox to license its patents to all corners in 1975 were substantially affected by the initial conditions at the beginning of the competitive period. Plain paper copiers are complex, highly technical products. Firms vary in the degree of non hardware service they bundle to their machines. Xerox had an extremely large rental fleet of copiers at the time of entry. As a result, the capital loss on existing copiers due to competitive price falls were born by Xerox, not by old customers. A table in the article shows rates of change of prices indexes for PPCs calculated on the basis of standard lease contracts for those machines which do not change features between years.

This article presents information on the ninetieth annual meeting of the American Economic Association, held during December 27-30, 1977, in New York. Meetings will take place on different related topics to economics. Some of the topics that will be discussed are--economics of life and safety; the negative income tax and the role of social experimentation; pricing in public utilities; economics of education; and recent advances in theory and practice.

This article presents the program for the 89th Annual Meeting of the American Economic Association that is scheduled from September 15-18, 1976 in Atlantic City, New Jersey.

In 1963 economists Milton Friedman and David Meiselman published a paper for the Commission on "Money and Credit," in which they attempt to test the relative predictive power of Keynesian and monetary theories of business fluctuations. Their methods and conclusions were sharply disputed in papers by scholars Donald Hester, Albert Ando and Franco Modigliani, and Michael DePrano and Thomas Mayer. The purpose is to review this controversy. The method is the simple one of first replicating the studies over the original sample periods and then examining the postsample performance of the competing equations. On a sociological level there can be little doubt that this controversy was and continues to be, enormously valuable. Many economists have been stimulated to work on the questions disputed by the monetarist and Keynesian combatants and it is probably correct to argue that two models of the U.S. economy are a direct outgrowth of the controversy. What has been missing from this continuing controversy, however, is an ex post evaluation of the earlier empirical work.

The article presents a report from the editor of the publication “American Economic Review,” published by the American Economic Association (AEA). She notes that AEA will launch the periodical "American Economic Journal: Applied Economics" (AEJ:AE) in 2009. AEJ:AE will have one co-editor, Thomas Lemieux, and a board of editors comprising several academics. Papers will be submitted to AEJ:AE via the Internet, and the author discusses in detail how these papers will be assigned and reviewed. Data for manuscripts submitted to AEJ:AE as of October 31, 2007 are provided.

Corrupt government hiring is common in developing countries. This paper uses original data to document the operation and consequences of corrupt hiring in a health bureaucracy. Hires pay bribes averaging 17 months of salary, but contrary to conventional wisdom, their observable quality is comparable to counterfactual merit-based hires. Exploiting variation across jobs, I show that the consequences of corrupt allocations depend on the correlation between wealth and quality among applicants: service delivery outcomes are good for jobs where this was positive and poor when negative. In this setting, the correlation was typically positive, leading to relatively good performance of hires. (JEL D73, I11, J16, J24, J45, M51, O17) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article suggests that there are three alternatives to overcome the U.S. balance payment of deficit. The author of this article argues that increasing crises occur in the system because of the udervaluation of gold, that the elasticity of the gold exchange standard based on the U.S. balance of payments has enabled the system to operate successfully in the past decade, and that the use of paper gold is the only device on which a lasting world monetary system can be based. The so called U.S. "balance-of-payments deficit" is the result of sign the growth in world demand for reserve media which, since 1958, could only be supplied by the U.S. and is not the consequence of a faulty adjustment mechanism. Elimination of the system of crises could be accomplished either by an increase in the real price of gold or by the introduction of paper gold, but the simultaneous elimination of the sequences of crises and the U.S. balance-of-payments deficit can only be resolved by the introduction of paper gold. Therefore a solution through paper gold is better than return to real gold.

There has been an ever-growing stream of books, pamphlets and articles on how to achieve and maintain employment, as of September 1944. It has become quite impossible for economists to read all these recipes, mainly because they all say more or less the same thing. They nearly all agree that the way to keep up the level of national employment is to keep up the level of national expenditure. In one way and another, national expenditure was permitted to increase in a number of countries, and some measure of recovery was achieved in the process. The reason for the recovery was not always understood, it was attributed to cheap money, an unbalanced budget, raising of tariffs, devaluation of the currency, increasing the general price level and so on, by the countries adopting these various measures. It was not realized that it was only in so far as the measures taken involved an increase in the total volume of spending in the country concerned that they could raise its level of employment at all and that in itself a rise in prices, far from promoting recovery, diminished the effect in stimulating employment of a given increase in spending. The article talks about the recent British government report on employment policy. There is nothing particularly novel about any of the measures recommended in the policy, nor do they involve any revolutionary change in economic practice or organization. What is new is, first, that the government there accept as one of their primary aims and responsibilities the maintenance of a high and stable level of employment and second, that the various measures proposed are commended as part of a single coherent plan.

This article examines the practice of the federal reserve banks in requiring eligible or near-eligible paper as so-called "marginal" or "additional collateral," to paper discounted by them, in contradistinction to advances on member bank' notes payable collateraled by United States securities or eligible paper. As a setting for collateraled discounts, the history and purposes of collateraled advances are stated, as well as the reasons for the ascendancy of such advances over discount. In their publications the federal reserve authorities fail to acknowledge any difference between (1) rediscounting and (2) allowing advances against eligible paper pledged; nor do they report separately the absolute or relative amount of discounts to which "additional collateral" is required, nor the "margin" required, nor the number of members putting up such margins, nor any other data relative thereto. There are no provisions in the Federal Reserve act or regulations for the practice; and yet it is no mean method of credit control. The reasons offered by the reserve banks for the practice are: (1) to repress excessive borrowing by the applicant member, in the Interest of the reserve bank, of the applicant member, or of the system as a whole, using this device as a supplement to credit rationing, discount rate variation, and moral suasion; (2) to increase the protection to the reserve banks themselves for credits granted; (8) to compensate for the less rigid insistence by the reserve banks on technical qualifications in credit granting and thus to make possible greater extensions of credit to members than can be had on the strict merit of the paper offered for discount; and (4) to acquiesce in greater degree to the traditional methods of Inter-bank finance and to break down the isolation of the reserve banks from the business and financial world. Each of these reasons is examined and criticized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In view of the unsettled condition of European industry and finance, of the depreciated and fluctuating exchanges, and of the enormously heavy tax burdens, existing or prospective, pressure for prompt payment of either principal or interest at any early date would be most unwise. But eventual payment under a generously elastic funding arrangement is both possible and probable. The burden of settling for past wars will be less irksome than that of earlier days devoted to preparation for future wars, and the disturbance to the international money markets and exchange long since stabilized will be inconsiderable. Though advocating the cancellation of this foreign indebtedness, It should, however be a endeavor to make it at the same time an instrument of reform. It might fairly be required, in return for a gradual and progressive cancellation of these debts, that the debtor nations balance their budgets, that they stop the further emission of paper money and that they apply their resources to economic purposes rather than to armament.

This article presents discusses the "American Economic Journal: Microeconomics." The author offers information regarding the editorial staff of the journal, the publication processes, and article submission statistics. Several charts are provided that describe the recent history of the journal's publication as well as the main topics of its articles.

Intermittent monitoring of environmental standards may induce strategic changes in polluting activities. This paper documents local strategic responses to a cyclical, once-every-six-day air quality monitoring schedule under the federal Clean Air Act. Using satellite data of monitored areas, I show that air quality is significantly worse on unmonitored days. This effect is explained by short-term suppression of pollution on monitored days, especially during high-pollution periods when the city's noncompliance risk is high. Cities' use of air quality warnings increases on monitored days, which suggests local governments' role in coordinating emission reductions. (JEL K32, Q35, Q58, R11) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies the interplay between genetics and family investments in the process of skill formation. We model and estimate the joint evolution of skills and parental investments throughout early childhood. We document three genetic mechanisms: the direct effect of child genes on skills, the indirect effect of child genes via parental investments, and family genetic influences captured by parental genes. We show that genetic effects are dynamic, increase over time, and operate via environmental channels. Our paper highlights the value of integrating biological and social perspectives into a single unified framework. (JEL I24, I26, J12, J13, J24) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers a report on the journal "American Economic Journal: Applied Economics" ("AEJ: Applied") for 2016. Topics include a list of peer reviewers for the journal, the editorial process for the journal, and journal policies regarding access to article data and revisions to articles in relation to author contracts.

An introduction is presented that discusses the volume theme papers and proceedings from the January 2017 annual meeting of the organization American Economic Association, noting the criteria for the selection of papers by president-elect Alvin Roth of the Association.

It is very important to know how much we can extrapolate from a study's results. This paper examines the issue using data from impact evaluations in development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Information regarding the scholarly periodical entitled the "American Economic Journal: Microeconomics," published by the American Economic Association, is presented.

The 2012 report from the editor of the periodical "American Economic Journal: Applied Economics" is presented. It announces that co-editors Thomas Lemieux and Liran Einav have both ended their tenure as editors to pursue other interests. It provides statistics on articles received by the periodical on topics including economic history, law and economics, and international economics. It acknowledges the contributions of Managing Editor Michelle DeBlasi, as well as Editorial Assistants Olivia Sweeney and Kelly Andrews.