This document provides a somewhat chatty discussion of selected research papers that may be accessible to a broader audience. It starts with a discussion of different styles of research in economics, to try to better explain how some of my "basic research" fits in and how it might be used by other economists, and why it might be important even if it doesn't directly relate to policy. The document then provides more in-depth discussion of a few selected papers in different areas of economics.
At the end of each extended description of a paper or set of papers, I have included an "executive summary" that boils the ideas down to a few sentences.
Related;
Harvard's Susan Athey wins the John Bates Clark Medal;
This year's medallist is Susan Athey, of Harvard University. She is the first woman to win (so far all the Nobels have gone to men). More important, though, is the breadth of Ms Athey's work. At 36, she has already made a mark in several fields: economic theory; applied economics, from auctions and industrial organisation to macroeconomics; and econometrics. “Susan's work on the foundations of economic theory is of fundamental importance,” says Paul Klemperer, a professor at Oxford, “showing economists when they can have confidence in their 'equilibrium' theories and when they can't.”
For example, economists frequently make simplifying assumptions about mathematical form. Most commonly, they may suppose a linear relationship between variables: when one thing goes up, another goes up or down by a fixed amount. That makes results easier to get—but at a cost: often there is no good reason to assume linearity. Ms Athey has shown that strong results can still be obtained even if you assume much less.
Clark Medal to Susan Athey ;
Athey's award is emblematic of the considerable progress women have made in economics in, say, the last twenty years. The Clark was first given in 1947 to Paul Samuelson. (Kenneth Boulding won in 1949, Milton Friedman in 1951, the committee deadlocked in 1953 and no award was made, before James Tobin was recognized in 1955 and Kenneth Arrow in 1957. The full list can be found here. Meanwhile, the somewhat similar Bernácer Prize, awarded annually since 2001 to a European economist under the age of 40, has been split evenly between women and men: Philip Lane (Trinity College Dublin), José Manuel Campa (Graduate School of Business New York University and University of Navarra, Luigi Zingales (GSB Chicago), Stephanie Schmitt-Grohe (Duke), Monika Piazzesi (GSB Chicago) and Hélène Rey (Princeton) in that order.
No comments:
Post a Comment