On behalf of the Comparative Advantage Editorial Board, I am honored to present the fifth volume of the Stanford Undergraduate Economics Journal.

The journal has grown tremendously this year in its efforts to create an accessible platform for readers to engage with our authors’ work. Our new website is designed to mirror the layout of professional academic journals, with individual articles available on separate pages and the journal displayed in its entirety in the Archives section. We additionally created the Comparative Advantage Blog to make our publication more approachable for younger readers. Shorter length submissions, literature reviews, and opinion pieces are published directly on the website in this section. As we are constantly developing new ideas to improve the journal, we appreciate any feedback our readers may have.

Although the outward aspect of the journal has changed, we have maintained our dedication to rigorous research. This year, our publication contains 7 original research papers on a diverse set of topics that our reviewers found thoughtful and compelling. In our selection process, we emphasize both empirical analysis and theoretical foundations, and we believe our final result will be valuable to the undergraduate economics community.

Finally, we would like to thank the Stanford Economics Association (SEA) and the Stanford Economics Department for their continued support and the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR) for collaborating with us on our new initiatives. We are excited to resume our partnerships in 2017-2018 and hope you will join us.

Laura Zhang

2017 Editor-In-Chief