Selected Abstracts.

The article presents abstracts of some articles on economics. One of the abstracts titled "The University Professor As a Utility Maximizer and Producer of Learning, Research, and Income," by W.E. Becker proposes plans for improving the teaching quality at major universities. These schemes typically do not rest on identifiable economic models. In this paper, a professorial decision-making model is presented for the purpose of exploring alternative plans to raise teaching quality. Using a Lancaster methodology, where time is a variable input, it is demonstrates that an increase in the pecuniary return to teaching will raise teaching quality, while exogenous changes in teaching and research technology need not. Another article titled "The Relative Quality of Economics Journals Revisited," by C.C. McDonough examines the degree of commonality among several criteria of journal quality and to develop a grand ranking for economics journals. Seventy economics journals are evaluated on the criteria of institutional affiliation, peer evaluation, familiarity, and citation frequency. Examination of the degree of association among the resulting rankings reveals high positive correlations. Accordingly the best estimate of the true ranking of the journals is obtained by the order of the sums of ranks.