2020 Number 1 NBER News


The NBER Reporter 2020 Number 1: News



Annual Report of Awards to NBER Affiliates

Olivier Blanchard was named a Distinguished Fellow of the American Economic Association.

Katharine G. Abraham was the inaugural recipient of the Society of Labor Economists' Prize for Contributions to Data and Measurement.

Lee Alston, Jeremy Atack, Michael Bordo, Barry Eichengreen, Stanley Engerman, Price Fishback, Claudia Goldin, Naomi Lamoreaux, Gary Libecap, Peter Lindert, Robert A. Margo, Joel Mokyr, Larry Neal, Hugh Rockoff, Richard Steckel, Richard Sylla, Peter Temin, Thomas Weiss, and Jeffrey Williamson were elected into the inaugural class of Economic History Association Fellows.

Nikhil Agarwal received an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Research Fellowship.

Ann Bartel was elected a Fellow of the Society of Labor Economists.

Howard Bodenhorn was the runner-up for the Georgescu-Roegen Prize for best article published in the Southern Economic Journal.

Axel Börsch-Supan received an honorary doctorate from Rostock University.

Leah P. Boustan received the Institute for Labor Economics (IZA) Young Labor Economist Award, recognizing an outstanding labor economist within 15 years of PhD award.

Dennis W. Carlton received a 2019 Antitrust Writing Award for Academic Articles — Economics for "Vertical Most-Favored-Nation Restraints and Credit Card No-Surcharge Rules," (with Ralph Winter) in the Journal of Law and Economics.

William Collins and Gregory Niemesh won the 2018 Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS) Research Award for the best research using these data to advance or deepen understanding of social and demographic processes.

Dalton Conley was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Philip Cook received the Stockholm Prize in Criminology for 2020, which is awarded for outstanding achievements in criminological research.

Zack Cooper received a 2019 Andrew Carnegie Fellowship from the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

Janet Currie was elected to the National Academy of Sciences.

Thomas S. Dee received the Raymond Vernon Memorial Award from the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management (APPAM) for "The Effects of Accountability Incentives in Early Childhood Education," (with Daphna Bassok and Scott Latham), published in the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management.

Roger Farmer was honored with a special issue of the International Journal of Economic Theory on "Market Frictions in Macroeconomic Dynamics."

Joshua Gans received the Public Utility Research Center Distinguished Service Award, recognizing cumulative impact of research and policy analyses on both the academic community and regulatory policymakers.

Gopi Shah Goda received the Financial Literacy Research Award from the Global Financial Literacy Excellence Center for "Who Is a Passive Saver under Opt-In and Auto-Enrollment?" (with Matthew Levy, Colleen Flaherty Manchester, Aaron Sojourner, and Joshua Tasoff).

Claudia Goldin received the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Economics, Finance, and Management.

Farley Grubb received the 2019 Lawrence Brewster Faculty Paper Award from the North Carolina Association of Historians.

Bronwyn H. Hall received the inaugural Special Award from the Conference on Corporate R&D and Innovation at the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission.

Oliver Hart was named a Distinguished Fellow of the American Economic Association and received an honorary Doctor of Science degree from the London School of Economics.

David Hirshleifer served as president of the American Finance Association.

Louis Kaplow received the National Tax Association's Daniel M. Holland Medal for lifetime achievement in the study of public finance.

Amanda Kowalski received the 2019 ASHEcon Medal from the American Society of Health Economists, recognizing an economist, age 40 or under, who has made the most significant contributions to the field of health economics.

Kevin Lang was elected vice president of the Society of Labor Economists (2019–20) and will serve as its president-elect (2020–21) and president (2021–22).

Edward Lazear was named a Distinguished Fellow of the American Economic Association.

Lee Lockwood won the 2019 TIAA Paul A. Samuelson Award for Outstanding Scholarly Writing on Lifelong Financial Security.

Guido Lorenzoni was elected a fellow of the Econometric Society.

Brigitte Madrian received the Skandia Research Prize for outstanding research on "Long-Term Savings" with relevance for banking, insurance, and financial services.

Matteo Maggiori received a Guggenheim Fellowship and was awarded the Carlo Alberto Medal, awarded biennially to the best Italian economist under 40.

Pinar Karaca Mandic's PRISM project (PROMIS Reporting and Insight System from Minnesota) received the grand prize in the Step-up App Challenge of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) and placed second at the Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources App competition of the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA).

N. Gregory Mankiw received the John R. Commons Award from Omicron Delta Epsilon, the economics honor society.

James Markusen received an honorary doctorate from the University of Tübingen.

Isaac McFarlin's paper "Education for All? A Nationwide Audit Study of School Choice," (with Peter Bergman) won the Best Education Research Study of 2019 Award from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute.

Loukas Karabarbounis and Stelios Michalopoulos shared the biennial Distinguished Scientist Award in Social-Economic Sciences from the Bodossaki Foundation, awarded to scholars of Greek descent under the age of 40.

Bridget Terry Long and Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach were elected to the National Academy of Education.

Olivia S. Mitchell was elected vice president of the American Economic Association and was awarded the 2019 Financial Industry Regulatory Authority Investor Education Foundation Ketchum Prize.

Robert Moffitt was elected to membership in the National Academy of Sciences, and is the president-elect of the Society of Labor Economists.

John Mullahy was awarded the 2019 Willard G. Manning Memorial Award for Best Research in Health Econometrics by the American Society of Health Economists for his paper "Individual Results May Vary: Inequality-Probability Bounds for Some Health-Outcome Treatment Effects" in the Journal of Health Economics.

Casey Mulligan received the National Tax Association's Richard A. Musgrave Prize for his paper on "Wedges, Labor Market Behavior, and Health Insurance Coverage under the Affordable Care Act" (with Trevor S. Gallen) in the National Tax Journal and was awarded the 2019 Wolfram Innovator Award for his innovative work on automated economic reasoning.

Emi Nakamura was awarded the John Bates Clark Medal by the American Economic Association.

David Neumark was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Kevin O'Rourke was elected a Fellow of the Academy of Social Science.

Christopher Palmer won the Society for Financial Studies Cavalcade Award for the Best Paper in Corporate Finance for "The Capitalization of Consumer Financing into Durable Goods Prices" (with Bronson Argyle, Taylor Nadauld, and Ryan Pratt).

Michaela Pagel and Michael Weber won the AQR London Business School Asset Management Institute Young Researcher Award for new academics producing relevant, innovative, and impactful research in the field of asset management.

Ariel Pakes was named a Distinguished Fellow of the American Economic Association.

Ricardo Perez-Truglia received an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Research Fellowship.

James Poterba received an honorary Doctor of Laws degree from the University of Notre Dame.

Hélène Rey was named a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Economic Association.

Adam Sacarny received the AcademyHealth Publication of the Year Award, and was a finalist for the National Institute for Health Care Management Health Care Research Award, for his paper "Effect of Peer Comparison Letters for High-Volume Primary Care Prescribers of Quetiapine in Older and Disabled Adults: A Randomized Clinical Trial" (with Michael L. Barnett, Jackson Le, Frank Tetkoski, David Yokum, and Shantanu Agrawal) in JAMA Psychiatry.

José A. Scheinkman delivered the 2019 Arrow Lecture at the Israel Institute for Advanced Studies.

John Michael Van Reenen won the National Institute for Health Care Management Foundation Award for his paper "The Price Ain't Right? Hospital Prices and Health Spending on the Privately Insured" (with Zack Cooper, Stuart Craig and Martin Gaynor) in the Quarterly Journal of Economics.

Angelino Viceisza was selected as the W. Glenn Campbell and Rita Ricardo-Campbell National Fellow and the John Stauffer National Fellow at the Hoover Institution.

Marianne H. Wanamaker received the Kenneth J. Arrow Award from the International Health Economics Association for the best health economics paper published in 2018.

Michael Woodford received the Banque de France/Toulouse School of Economics Senior Prize in Monetary Economics and Finance.

Lu Zhang received the Spängler IQAM Best Paper Prize for the best investments paper in the Review of Finance for "Which Factors?" (with Kewei Hou, Haitao Mo, and Chen Xue).

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NBER Pre- and Post-Doctoral Fellows for 2020–21 Academic Year

Fifteen researchers — 10 post-doctoral scholars and five pre-doctoral students — have been named to NBER fellowships for the 2020–21 academic year. These fellows are selected by review panels following widely disseminated calls for applications.

Post-Doctoral Fellowships

Emilie Jackson, who is analyzing how the shift from traditional employment to self-employment affects tax revenues and the demand for government benefits, and Sean Myers, who studies the funding of state and local defined-benefit pension plans, have been awarded fellowships for research on long-term fiscal policy. These fellowships are supported by the Peter G. Peterson Foundation. Both Jackson and Myers are completing PhDs at Stanford University.

Victoria Marrone, who studies the design and regulation of health insurance markets, and Francis Wong, who is analyzing how medical debt affects mental and physical health and health care utilization, will be supported by the NBER's National Institute on Aging Fellowship Program in Aging and Health Research. Marrone is finishing her PhD at Northwestern University, and Francis Wong is finishing hers at the University of California, Berkeley.

The Social Security Administration supports two fellows through the NBER's Retirement and Disability Policy Research Program. For the coming academic year, the fellows will be Adrienne Sabety, who is studying the increase in opioid prescriptions of 30 days or more for older patients, and Mingli Zhong, who is analyzing the wealth and welfare consequences of retirement saving policies, including features of automatic enrollment plans and default options. Sabety is completing her PhD at Harvard University, Zhong hers at the University of Pennsylvania.

Adelina Yanyue Wang, who completed her doctoral studies at Stanford University, will be the NBER’s Post-Doctoral Fellow on the Economics of an Aging Workforce. This fellowship is supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Wang studies how access to affordable and quality long-term care services for the elderly affects the retirement decisions of their adult children.

Caitlin Gorback, who completed her PhD at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, will be a post-doctoral researcher on the NBER's Transportation in the 21st Century Initiative. Gorback studies how transportation innovations such as ride-sharing affect the distribution of economic activities in urban areas.

Krisztina Orban, who completed her doctorate at the University of Chicago, will be studying entrepreneurship with the support of a post-doctoral award for entrepreneurship research from the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation. Her dissertation research analyzed the determinants of firm-level and aggregate productivity in Hungary after the fall of communism.

Santiago Perez, who studies the intergenerational transmission of economic status in a variety of settings, including by using linked decennial U.S. Census data, is the inaugural NBER post-doctoral fellow on the Economics of Mobility. This position is supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Perez is an assistant professor of economics at the University of California, Davis, and a Faculty Research Fellow at the NBER.

Pre-Doctoral Fellowships

The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation supports three pre-doctoral fellows who are studying energy economics. For 2020–21, these fellows are Sarah Armitage of Harvard University, who is studying technology transitions and the timing of environmental policy, Nafisa Lohawala of the University of Michigan, who is studying the effects of electric vehicle subsidies on vehicle demand, and Aspen Fryberger Underwood of Clemson University, who is analyzing the factors that affect the adoption and usage of electric vehicles.

The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation also supports two pre-doctoral fellows studying behavioral macroeconomics. The fellows for the coming year will be Miguel Acosta of Columbia University, whose dissertation studies the aggregate demand effects of monetary policy, and Peter Maxted of Harvard University, who is examining the effects of business and consumer sentiment in a macro-financial model.

Calls for fellowship applications are posted each fall, and application closing dates are usually in early December.

Register for announcements of future fellowship opportunities


This article was updated on Aug. 5, 2020.

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