Of the multiple efforts now underway to get the word out about the MRRC< the latest to debut is the MRRC conference booth. This method of disseminating informationis widely used at annual meetins of professional associations. The first MRRC booth appeared at the annual meeting of the Gerontological Society of America (GSA). The booth was staffed by two MRRC affiliates who responded to various queries from conference attendees. In addition to a presentationboard, the booth will regularly contain materials for distribution including copies of MRRC working papers, a full listing of research topics, the center newsletter, brochures about eh center and the Sandelll dissertation award, and other products as they become available. The MRRC booth will next appear at the Annual Meeting of the Allied Social Science Association in New Orleans, January 5-7, 2001.

Professor Olivia Mitchell of The Wharton School, co-author ofth research brief highlighted in the issue, was the 1999 winner of TIAA-CREF's Samuelson Award for Outstanding Scholarly Writing on Lifelong Financial Securtiy. The Samuelson Award is named after Nobel economics laureate and former CREF trustee Paul A. Samuelson and comes with a $20,000 honorarium. Dr. Mitchell's collaborators in the award-winning research and co-awardees are John Geanakoplos of Yale University and Stephen Zeldes of Columbia University. The authors argue that Social Security privatization has transaction costs and risk levels that have not been fully accounted for in various privatization proposals. They also propose that the transition costs associated with any shift toward privatization have not been given sufficient attnetion.