2008-9 Awards and Honors
A number of NBER researchers received honors, awards, and other forms of professional recognition during 2008 and early 2009. A list of these honors, excluding those that were bestowed by the researcher's home university and listing researchers in alphabetical order, is presented below.
- Yacine Ait-Sahalia was elected a Fellow of the American Statistical Association and the Journal of Econometrics and delivered the Hermann Otto Hirshfeld Lectures, Humboldt University, Berlin, in 2008; she also received the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship for 2008-9.
- Elizabeth Oltmans Ananat became a Research Associate of the National Poverty Center at the University of Michigan.
- Torben Andersen was elected a Fellow of the Econometric Society during 2008.
- Ashish Arora served on the "Measuring Innovation in the 21st Century" Economy Advisory Committee to the U.S. Secretary of Commerce.
- Katherine Baicker was elected to the Board of Directors of Academy Health and was appointed to the editorial board of the Journal of Health Economics.
- Anirban Basu received the Alan Williams Health Economics Fellowship for 2008 from the University of York (U.K.) He was also the 2008 Program Chair for the Health Policy Statistics Section of the American Statistical Association.
- Paul Beaudry was awarded the 2008 John Rae prize for the most significant contribution to economic research in Canada over the last five years.
- David Blanchflower presented the Esmée Fairbairn Memorial Lecture at Lancaster University on October 30, 2007.
- Rebecca Blank received the Distinguished Alumni Award at the University of Minnesota. She also will deliver the Sulzberger Lecture at Duke University's Sanford Institute of Public Policy.
- Francine D. Blau has been named one of the five inaugural Academic Fellows of the Labor and Employment Relations Association (LERA).
- David Bloom was appointed an Ambassador in the Paul G. Rogers Society for Global Health.
- Nicholas Bloom and Alex Mas won the Labor and Employment Relations Association's 2007 John T. Dunlop Scholar Award for "outstanding academic contributions to research by recent entrants to the field."
- Jeffrey R. Brown was nominated by President Bush for the position of Public Trustee of the Social Security and Medicare Trust Funds; he was awarded the Early Career Scholarly Achievement Award from the American Risk and Insurance Association; and he and Amy Finkelstein received the 2008 TIAA-CREF Paul A. Samuelson Award for their paper, "The Interaction of Public and Private Insurance: Medicaid and the Long-Term Care Insurance Market."
- Richard V. Burkhauser is President-Elect of the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management. His term will begin in 2010. He also received the 2008 Felix Buchal Award for scholarship in interdisciplinary longitudinal research using the German Socio-Economic Panel. Finally, in 2008 he was the R.I. Downing Visiting Fellow at the University of Melbourne.
- John Y. Campbell received an honorary doctorate from the University of Maastricht, in the Netherlands, on January 8, 2009.
- Dennis W. Carlton, and his co-authors Joshua Gans and Michael Waldman, received the Robert F. Lanzilotti Prize, awarded by the International Industrial Organization Society, for the Best Paper in Antitrust Economics. Their paper is "Why Tie a Product Consumers Do Not Use?" (NBER Working Paper No. 13339).
- Amitabh Chandra won the Eugene Garfield award with Douglas O. Staiger for the Impact of Medical Research. He was named a co-editor of the Journal of Human Resources and is on the editorial board of the American Economic Review (Applied).
- Raj Chetty received an Alfred P. Sloan research fellowship and the American Young Economist Award.
- Richard H. Clarida, Jordi Gali, and Mark Gertler won the First Prize Award for Best Paper presented at the NBER's International Seminar on Macroeconomics during its first 25 years (on the occasion of ISOM's thirtieth anniversary in June 2008). The paper, written in 1998, was "Monetary policy rules in practice - Some international evidence" (NBER Working Paper No. 6254).
- Courtney Coile became a member of the National Academy of Social Insurance.
- Philip J. Cook and Jacob Vigdor (with co-authors Robert MacCoun and Clara Muschkin) received the Raymond Vernon Memorial Prize for the best article published in the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management in 2008.
- Mario J. Crucini was appointed to a three-year term as Associate Editor of the Journal of Monetary Economics, effective July 1, 2008. He became a Senior Fellow at the Globalization and Monetary Policy Institute, Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, in June 2008. He was also the Weatherall Visiting Fellow, Queen's University, Canada, from July 1 - August 30, 2008.
- Janet Currie is the inaugural holder of the Sami Mnaymneh Chair in Economics at Columbia University.
- Steven J. Davis has been appointed the Editor of the American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics.
- Angus Deaton received an honorary Doctor of Letters from the University of St. Andrews (Scotland) in June 2008.
- Peter DeMarzo won the Michael Brennan Award Second-Place Prize for his paper "Agency and Optimal Investment Dynamics" (with Michael Fishman), published in the Review of Financial Studies. He was also elected Vice President of the Western Finance Association.
- Mihir A. Desai, C. Fritz Foley, and James R. Hines, Jr. co-authored the paper "Dividend policy inside the multinational firm" (NBER Working Paper No. 8698), which was awarded the Pearson Prize by the Financial Management Association. Another paper by Desai, Alexander Dyck, and Luigi Zingales, titled "Theft and Taxes" (NBER Working Paper No. 10978), was a second place winner of the Jensen Prize for the Best Papers Published in the Journal of Financial Economics in the Areas of Corporate Finance and Organizations, 2007.
- Erwin Diewert became a fellow of the American Economic Association.
- Darrell Duffie was elected President of the American Finance Association. He also gave the Princeton Lectures in Finance, and was the Nash Lecturer at Carnegie-Mellon University.
- Esther Duflo received the "Prix Luc Durand-Reville from the Academie des Sciences Morale et Politiques, France in 2008.
- William Easterly won the Hayek Award for Best Book of the Last Two Years from the Manhattan Institute and delivered the Dobriansky Lecture at Georgetown University.
- Ronald G. Ehrenberg was awarded an honorary Doctor of Science degree by the State University of New York and was named a fellow of the American Educational Research Association.
- Isaac Ehrlich was appointed by Governor David Patterson to serve on his new Council of Economic Advisers.
- Martin Feldstein received the 2008 Butler Award from the New York Association for Business Economics.
- Amy Finkelstein received the 2008 American Economic Association's Elaine Bennett Research Prize "awarded every other year to recognize, support, and encourage outstanding contributions by young women in the economics profession." She and Jeffrey R. Brown also received the 2008 TIAA-CREF Paul A. Samuelson Award for their paper: "The Interaction of Public and Private Insurance: Medicaid and the Long-Term Care Insurance Market" (AER, June 2008 and NBER Working Paper No. 10989).
- Price Fishback was appointed co-editor of the Journal of Economic History.
- Richard Freeman has been named one of the five inaugural Academic Fellows of the Labor and Employment Relations Association (LERA).
- Ken Froot won the Witt Award of the American Risk and Insurance Association for his article, "Risk Management, Capital Budgeting, and Capital Structure Policy for Insurers and Reinsurers" (NBER Working Paper No. 10184).
- Nicola Fuchs-Schündeln was awarded the "2008 DAAD Prize for Distinguished Scholarship in German and European Studies" by the American Institute for Contemporary German Studies.
- Mikhail Golosov received an NSF CAREER grant, the NSF's major award in support of early-career scientists, and a Sloan Fellowship, in 2008.
- Robert J. Gordon delivered the A. W. H. Phillips invited lecture at the Australasian meetings of the Econometric Society in July 2008. He also presented invited lectures at the 14th Dubrovnik Economic Conference in Dubrovnik, Croatia, in June; at the International Workshop on Chinese Productivity, Hangzhou, China, in September; and at the Seventh Macroeconomic Policy Research Workshop of the Hungarian Central Bank and CEPR, Budapest, in October.
- Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas won the 2008 prize for the best young French economist (under age 40) awarded by Cercle des Economistes and Le Monde.
- Michael Grossman was awarded the 2008 Victor Fuchs Award. Also, Nankai University has announced the establishment of the Nankai-Grossman Center of Health Economics and Medical Insurance. Professor Grossman will serve as the Center's Honorary Director and Chairperson of its Academic Committee.
- Philip Haile was named a Fellow of the Econometric Society.
- Michael Haines was recently elected Vice President of the Economic History Association.
- Robert E. Hall was selected to run unopposed for President of the American Economic Association, was elected, and will serve for the year 2010.
- James D. Hamilton presented the Esther Peterson Lecture at the Joint Meeting of the American Agricultural Economics Association and the American Council on Consumer Interests. He was also keynote speaker at the 5th Colloquium on Modern Tools for Business Cycle Analysis in Luxembourg and at the Society for Nonlinear Dynamics and Econometrics Sixteenth Annual Symposium.
- Eric A. Hanushek became a Fellow of the American Educational Research Association; he also became chair of the Board of Directors for the National Board for Education Sciences.
- Geoffrey Heal received an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Paris, Dauphine, in November 2008.
- James J. Heckman became a Resident Member of the American Philosophical Society, a Fellow of the International Statistical Institute, and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, in 2008.
- Takatoshi Ito becomes the fourth holder of the Tun Ismail Ali Chair of Faculty of Economics at the University of Malaya.
- Michael C. Jensen received the 2007 Herbert Simon Award for outstanding contributions to business research by Rajk Laszlo College, Budapest, Hungary, and the Dean's Leadership Award in Corporate Governance from LeBow College of Business, Drexel University.
- Anil K Kashyap, Raghuram Rajan, and Jeremy C. Stein co-authored NBER Working Paper No. 6962, which was selected by the New York Times Magazine in December 2008 as one of the "ideas of the year."
- John Kennan was elected a Fellow of the Society of Labor Economists.
- Michael Kremer was named a fellow of the Econometric Society.
- Alan B. Krueger was awarded the Susan C. Eaton Award by the Labor and Employment Relations Association. The award "is given annually to a member of the Association who has achieved distinction as both a scholar and practitioner in the labor field." He also was selected to give the Distinguished Lecture in Economics and Government by the Society of Government Economists at the January 2009 ASSA meeting.
- Naomi Lamoreaux is president-elect of the Economic History Association; she will become president in September 2009.
- Eric Michael Leeper spent two months as a Professorial Fellow in Monetary Economics and Finance at Victoria University Wellington and the Reserve Bank of New Zealand.
- Jonathan D. Levin was elected a Fellow of the Econometric Society.
- Nuno Limão received the Kiel Institute's "Excellence Award in Global Economic Affairs", which aims "to build a community of the brightest young researchers in the area of global economic affairs."
- Jin-Tan Liu received the Academic Award from the Ministry of Education, Taiwan in 2008.
- Robert A. Margo is a Visiting Scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation, New York City, from September 2008 until June 2009.
- Alexandre Mas and Nicholas Bloom received the John T. Dunlop award from the Labor and Employment Relations Association for outstanding research by someone who has received a terminal degree within the last ten years.
- Robert C. Merton was given the inaugural Distinguished Finance Educator Award by the Financial Education Association in September 2008.
- Olivia S. Mitchell was awarded the 2008 Roger F. Murray Prize from the Institute for Quantitative Research in Finance. She also received the 2008 Carolyn Shaw Bell Award of the Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession.
- Randall Morck received the J. Gordin Kaplan Award for Excellence in Research from the University of Alberta in 2008.
- Enrico Moretti won the Carlo Alberto Medal, presented to an Italian economist under the age of 40 for outstanding research contributions to the field of economics.
- Dale Mortensen was named a Distinguished Fellow of the American Economic Association.
- Aldo Musacchio won the Arthur H. Cole Prize in 2008, awarded by the Economic History Association for the best paper published in the Journal of Economic History between September 2007 and September 2008.
- Joseph P. Newhouse was named to the (U.S.) Comptroller General's Advisory Committee.
- Gerard Padro i Miquel received the ESRC (Economic and Social Research Council) first grant in July 2008, the organization's main award in support of early-career researchers. The ESRC is the main research council for social sciences in the U.K.
- Lubos Pastor received the NASDAQ Award for the best paper on capital formation at the 2008 Western Finance Association conference, for "Entrepreneurial learning, the IPO decision, and the post-IPO drop in firm profitability" (NBER Working Paper No. 12792), joint with Lucian Taylor and Pietro Veronesi. He also received the 2008 Q Group Research Award, for "Are stocks really less volatile in the long run?" joint with Robert F. Stambaugh.
- Monika Piazzesi became a Fellow of the Econometric Society.
- Rob Porter was selected as the Distinguished Fellow of the Industrial Organization Society for 2009.
- James Poterba is the President of the National Tax Association and Vice-President of the American Economic Association.
- Edward C. Prescott was elected a member of the National Academy of Science.
- Manju Puri won the Fama/DFA Prize for the best paper in the Journal of Financial Economics in the Areas of Capital Markets and Asset Pricing (the second prize award) for "Optimism and Economic Choice" (with David Robinson), NBER Working Paper No. 11361.
- Yi Qian received a research grant from the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation in the summer of 2008. "Does Ethnic Link Pay?" written with Yasheng Huang (MIT) and Li Jin (HBS), won the best paper award at the TCFA (The Chinese Financial Association) conference in November 2008.
- Daniel L. Rubinfeld was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Basel, Switzerland, in November 2008.
- Antoinette Schoar was awarded the Ewing Marion Kauffman Prize Medal for Distinguished Research in Entrepreneurship, 2009.
- José A. Scheinkman was elected a Member of the National Academy of Sciences.
- Kathryn Shaw delivered the Adam Smith Lecture, European Labor Economics Association, in Amsterdam in September 2008; she also was elected a Fellow of the Society of Labor Economists.
- Pablo T. Spiller is the President-Elect of the International Society for New Institutional Economics.
- Robert W. Staiger was elected a Fellow of The Econometric Society in 2008.
- Richard Sutch received the 2008 Thomas Jefferson Award from the Society for History in the Federal Government.
- John Tyler was one of three national recipients of the Senior Urban Research Fellowship from the Council of Great City Schools for research he will be conducting in the Cincinnati School District on how teacher use of student performance data, as provided by a web-based application, affects their classroom instruction.
- Pietro Veronesi's paper, Entrepreneurial Learning, the IPO Decision, and the Post-IPO Drop in Firm Profitability (NBER Working Paper No. 12792), with Lubos Pastor (University of Chicago and NBER) and Lucian Taylor (University of Pennsylvania) won the NASDAQ Award for the best paper on capital formation at the 2008 Western Finance Association conference.
- Gianluca Violante will become Managing Editor of The Review of Economics Dynamics in January 2009.
- Joel Waldfogel won the "Best Article of the Year" Prize for 2006 from the Journal of Industrial Economics. The article, co-authored with Lu Chen, is "Does Information Undermine Brand? Information Intermediary Use and Preference for Branded Web Retailers". (NBER Working Paper No 9942).
- Michael Whinston's article with Ilya Segal, "Antitrust in Innovative Industries" (NBER Working Paper No. 11525 and American Economic Review, 97, December 2007, pp. 1703-30), won the 2008 Compass Lexicon Prize for best article on antitrust economics.
- Jeffrey G. Williamson presented the: Joseph Fisher Public Lecture, University of Adelaide (Australia); Trevor Swan Distinguished Lecture, Australian National University; John Hicks Lecture, Oxford University; Fundacion Areces Public Lecture, Madrid; and the University Inaugural Lecture, University Pompeu Fabra (Spain).
- Richard Zeckhauser's article with Richard Frank, "Custom-Made Versus Ready-to-Wear Treatments: Behavioral Propensities in Physicians' Choices" (NBER Working Paper No. 13445), won the National Institute of Health Care Management's best paper of the year award for 2008. Zeckhauser also was the Lee Kwan Yew Distinguished Visitor to Singapore in 2008.