About Williams College:

Williams is a highly selective coeducational liberal arts college located in northwestern Massachusetts in a town of 8,000 people. Founded in 1793, Williams now has 2,100 full-time undergraduates; 51 percent are men, 49 percent women. Williams College's endowment exceeds $600 million, ranking among the top decile of all colleges and universities, as measured on both total endowment and endowment per student.

The Economics Department:

The Economics Department has 22 regular faculty. In a typical year, the group in residence numbers about 16.  In addition to a strong undergraduate Economics Department, the College has the Center for Development Economics, staffed by the Economics Department, which offers an M.A. program in Development Economics for economists from developing countries.

Department members present results of their ongoing research at weekly economics faculty seminars throughout the academic year. The department has recently been ranked first among economics departments at national liberal arts colleges based on research publications (J. Hartley and M. Robinson, "Economics Research at National Liberal Arts Colleges:  School Rankings," processed).  In addition to the faculty's own research, the department and Center for Development Economics regularly bring in economists from other institutions to present work in progress. The department has three working paper series -- Research Memoranda on economic development topics, Discussion Papers from the Williams Project in Higher Education, and Research Papers on all other topics. These papers are distributed to a large number of individuals and institutions in the U.S. and other countries and we receive their working papers in exchange.

Library:

The library has an excellent collection of periodicals and books in economics, is a government documents depository, and is linked to Dialog, an on-line bibliographic search service with close to 200 data bases. It maintains subscriptions to all major journals in economics including those of virtually every sub-field. The Library also has an extensive collection of periodical indexes and data bases available on CD ROM. These include Econlit, PAIS, Pro Quest, The National Trade Data Bank, and the 1990 Census.