1. David Warsh offers a suggestion for the most prestigious female economist.

The answer is probably Carmen Reinhart, of the University of Maryland, when measured by citation counts, the yardstick commonly used to gauge professional fame.

Reminder that you can listen to a recording of Carmen in concert. Recommended. I heard it live and blogged on it. I don’t recall seeing Warsh there (he lives in Boston, so no surprise). Nor did I see Robert J. Samuelson, whose op-ed today gets into Reinhart-Rogoff territory without mentioning them.

2. The New York Times asks four economists if the stimulus worked. In case you’re interested in arguing from authority, the only genuine macroeconomist in the bunch is Mark Thoma.

My answer would have been “I don’t know.” This paper explains how I lost my macro religion.

It would appear that the great claim to fame of the stimulus is that it kept state and local governments from having to reduce spending. If you combine that with wage stickiness at the state and local level (that is, if you believe that they would cut jobs rather than cut pay for government workers), then the stimulus saved jobs. From a Recalculation perspective, one might ask whether those are the jobs that you would want to save.