Joe Halpern (1953-2026)

 Joseph Halpern was an early explorer of the interface between computer science and game theory.  

Here's his funeral home obit: 

Joseph Y. Halpern
May 29, 1953 — February 13, 2026 

"Joe spent nearly 30 years as a professor of computer science at Cornell, and was considered a pioneer in his field. He was famous for having an impressive influence in a wide variety of topics, working extensively at the intersection of computer science, philosophy, and game theory. His work has reshaped the way we think about topics such as reasoning about knowledge and causality. He is the recipient of prestigious awards such as the Gödel Prize and Dijkstra Prize, the co-author of three highly influential books, six patents, and over 300 papers." 

 

His student Daphne Koller writes:

In Memoriam: Joe Halpern

"Yesterday, my PhD advisor, Joe Halpern, passed away after a long battle with lung cancer. He was a brilliant mathematician, a transformative mentor, and a truly wonderful human being.

"Joe possessed the rare ability to identify unusual, deeply interesting problems and solve them with breathtaking elegance and rigor. He was also a master communicator who could distill the most complex concepts into simple, straightforward truths—a skill I strive to emulate every day." 

 

Here's his Google Scholar Page: Jospeh Halpern 

Interview in China (accompanying new edition of Who Gets What and Why)

 Southern People Weekly just published an interview about the new edition of the Chinese translation of my 2015 book Who Gets What and Why.  After talking about the book, they also asked questions about scientific work and Nobel prizes, and I'll include some of that below. (The English translation mostly renders "Roth" as "Ross," but in at least one place I am "Irwin Rothu.")

 Here's the link (in Chinese and in translation):

 正文
为什么“天上撒钱”不一定是好事？
南方人物周刊 2026-02-04 14:10

Why isn't "money falling from the sky" necessarily a good thing?
Southern People Weekly 2026-02-04 14:10
 

 Southern People Weekly: Although Nobel Prize-winning research often stems from studies conducted many years ago to see if it can withstand the test of time, in the long run, both the nationality distribution of laureates and the evolution of research topics reflect, to some extent, changes in the global economic power structure and intellectual trends. How do you view this interaction between "academics and the times"?

Ross: That's certainly true, both in the long and short term. After World War II, the United States' scientific research and university strength rose rapidly, leading the world and producing a large number of Nobel laureates. Among them were scholars who grew up in the United States, as well as scientists who were forced to migrate from Europe due to war and political circumstances.

Today, I have some concerns that the United States may be actively relinquishing this long-accumulated advantage—when outstanding scholars from around the world no longer feel comfortable and secure in American universities, they may choose to pursue their careers in China or Europe. Another noteworthy change is that, in the past, most economics professors at Peking University and Tsinghua University held doctorates from top American universities such as Princeton, MIT, or Harvard; now, an increasing number of professors are completing their doctoral education at Chinese universities. Overall, this is a good thing; more people dedicating themselves to scientific research benefits the world. I only hope that top American universities will continue to welcome scholars from all over the world.

Southern People Weekly: Every year when the Nobel Prize winners are announced, similar discussions erupt in China—despite its stellar economic performance, China still boasts a sparse number of Nobel laureates. A Chinese-American Nobel Prize judge, when discussing this phenomenon, stated that China's current evaluation system, centered on the number of papers and impact factors, objectively pushes research efforts towards already highly crowded and popular fields. The key to a breakthrough lies in identifying important research gaps and sustaining long-term, continuous investment. What advice do you have for young Chinese researchers?

Ross: There isn't just one way to do scientific research. Some people choose to tackle well-known, unsolved problems; they're running a "sprint." If you're not confident that you're smart enough to solve these well-known problems faster than others, then becoming famous through a sprint isn't for you.

Another path is to choose a job that requires long-term accumulation. I'm not referring to a marathon, which is still a race where speed is paramount, but rather to becoming a musician, which requires long-term creation and continuous exploration of new musical styles or genres to gain recognition.

Southern People Weekly: Your career path is the second one.

Ross: Yes, I've never considered myself smarter than anyone else. There wasn't much interest in matching theory early on, but I was very interested in it. My first paper on matching theory was initially submitted to an economics journal, titled "Matching Economics: Stability and Incentives." The journal's editor at the time was George Stigler, who was also the Nobel laureate in economics that year (1982).

He replied with a very polite letter, saying he had read the paper and found it "very interesting," but the only part of the entire article that could be considered economics was the word "economics" in the title. The paper discussed how to achieve stable matching through institutional arrangements in the absence of price adjustments and analyzed the incentives of participants. Stigler is one of the core economists of the Chicago School, known for his in-depth research on price theory. In his view, my paper did not constitute economic research.

So I published the paper in a mathematical operations research journal. Thirty years later, I won the Nobel Prize. During this time, matching theory gradually became part of economics, attracting more and more economists' attention. How could it not be (economics)? How people go to school, find jobs, and allocate kidney transplant resources are essentially matching problems. That (rejected) paper later became one of the papers cited in the Nobel Prize review.

Regardless of which path you choose, you should not make the Nobel Prize your research goal, because winning the prize itself is highly accidental.

Southern People Weekly: So, chasing a certain direction just because it seems important or popular may not necessarily bring you the success you want; similarly, you shouldn't give up your passion just because it's not popular or hasn't been recognized yet.

Ross: I often tell my graduate and doctoral students that you have to find a research area that is attractive enough to you. Because most days, you may not make any progress, but at the end of the day, you can still say to yourself, "Well, today was pretty interesting too." It is this enjoyment that draws you back to the work time and time again. ... you can't make something you dislike into something great.
...

Southern People Weekly: Some media outlets have summarized the Trump administration's trade strategy as using high-pressure threats, setting tight deadlines, and structured negotiation frameworks to leverage uncertainty and bargaining power to force concessions from the other side. From a game theory perspective, how do you evaluate this strategy?

Ross: I have some concerns that the current U.S. administration may not yet fully grasp the importance of being a reliable partner. Any long-term partnership, like a marriage, cannot involve daily discussions about "who does the dishes." True long-term cooperation means investing in the future at every moment, not just focusing on immediate gains. I fear we have overlooked this.

...

Southern People Weekly: Your academic journey also had its share of ups and downs—you dropped out of high school due to a lack of motivation, but successfully applied to university by taking weekend engineering courses at Columbia University; you failed your doctoral qualifying exam, but gained the appreciation of Bob Wilson (the American economist who won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2020), thus avoiding an unexpected interruption to your academic career. Do these life experiences influence your views on "matching mechanisms"?

Ross: Absolutely. There's something "magical" about the PhD program: when we admit students, we base our decisions on their undergraduate performance—the only information we have when making admissions decisions. But when we "sell" them and help them find jobs, we base our decisions on the research they've done during their PhD studies.

In other words, we admit students based on their ability to learn existing knowledge and complete coursework, but evaluate and recommend them based on their ability to discover the unknown and create new knowledge. These two abilities are not entirely the same. Unfortunately, we don't have a good way to accurately predict how outstanding a person will become as a researcher based solely on their undergraduate performance. 

##############

Earlier interview:

Wednesday, December 24, 2025  Interview about the new edition of the Chinese translation of Who Gets What and Why

 

Ken Rogoff's intellectual autobiography

 My Harvard colleague Ken Rogoff, who is almost certainly undominated in the joint space of competitive chess and academic economics, reflects on the economy during his long career in a new book.

Kenneth Rogoff, Our Dollar, Your Problem: An Insider’s View of Seven Turbulent Decades of Global Finance, and the Road Ahead. Yale 2025 

It is reviewed on the website of the Institute for New Economic Thinking --

 Education of a Grandmaster  By Perry G. Mehrling  

 I was struck by these paragraphs comparing competitive chess to academic economics.

"As a sometime intellectual biographer myself, I note the repeated chess analogies sprinkled throughout the book, and take them more seriously than Rogoff himself does. Indeed I would suggest that his early chess career, starting in high school, is the important intellectual formation we need to have in mind as the lens for understanding the moves in his second career as an economist. I have already mentioned his self-proclaimed penchant for bucking consensus. In chess everyone knows the standard openings, so to win you need to come up with a new move (on offense) or find a way to defend against your opponent’s new move (on defense). If it works, everyone studies the game and adds it to their own chess repertoire.

"That’s apparently how he understands the academic game as well, albeit perhaps subconsciously, and he was good at playing that game as well. Tenure at Harvard is basically the academic equivalent of international grandmaster status in chess, a status he achieved in 1978 just as he was starting his academic career. In chess, tournaments are where you test your skills against your rivals. In academia, conferences and workshops play an analogous role, and we know who won by subsequent publication placement. (Not nearly as objective as checkmate!) Throughout the book, we hear repeatedly about some of these academic rivalries—versus Stiglitz, Greenspan, Dooley et al, Rey, Summers, Krugman—with brief summaries of the moves that Rogoff made in crucial games. Games with lower ranked players are relegated to footnotes..." 

The job market for economists, 2026

 The WSJ has the story:

Economists Are Studying the Slowing Job Market—and Feeling It Themselves
Newly minted Ph.D.s tend to work for universities, government agencies and big white-collar companies. It’s not a great hiring time for any of them.  By  Justin Lahart 

"The economics job market is getting buffeted by a confluence of forces. Worries about federal funding have led many major universities to reduce, or even freeze, hiring. Jobs within the federal government have dried up. The private sector, where demand for economists has been intense in recent years, has pulled back. 

“It’s like a perfect storm,” said Syracuse University economist John Cawley, who heads the American Economic Association’s job market committee.

"The tough market for doctoral students finishing up their studies is hardly unique to economics. What’s different about economists is that they are intensely interested in measuring and understanding how labor markets work—and they have brought that to bear on their own profession. As a result, armed with data from the AEA and all the knowledge they gained in graduate school, doctoral students in economics have a much more precise grasp of what type of environment they are facing than their counterparts in political science, philosophy or biophysics.

...

"The economics job market has its own peculiar rhythms and hierarchies. In the fall, students who are finishing their Ph.D.s, as well as economists in postdoctoral programs, apply for jobs that typically start the following summer. But because students can apply to dozens, or even hundreds, of jobs, this creates a matching problem: How does a prospective employer know which candidates are serious?

"Economists, being economists, have tried to solve this. When a candidate applies for jobs via JOE, they are able to send up to two “signals” of interest for jobs they are particularly interested in—almost like a winking emoji on a dating app. That signaling system was put together with the help of Stanford economist Alvin Roth, who also developed systems for matching kidney donors with patients and New York City schoolchildren with schools." 

Erik Brynjolfsson interviewed in Newsweek

 Always thought provoking: 

Centaurs, Canaries and J-Curves: Pitfalls and Productivity Potential of AI
By Marcus Weldon 

"Brynjolfsson occupies a unique position as both a Stanford University professor and the head of the digital economy lab at the Institute for Human Centered AI, which allows him the freedom to pursue analyses that are not compromised by a particular corporate or financial agenda, but are still grounded in economic reality and, at the same time, also account for the human part of the equation. Indeed, one of the primary conclusions of our conversation is that augmentation of human tasks is where the real economic gains are to be found, rather than in replacing human activity by automation, and consequently that, as he puts it, “We need to treat humans as an end and not just a means to an end.” But what is particularly striking is that this seemingly facile and human-validating imperative is anything but that: it is based on hard economic facts and rigorous analyses that are gradually revealed over the course of our conversation." 

 

The above link also takes you to this video: 

 

#########

Erik has been thinking about AI for a long time (even if not as long as the folks I posted about yesterday). 

AEA Survey of hiring plans of U.S. Economics Departments (and an unrelated unprecedented AEA announcement about Larry Summers)

 Here's the latest survey of the job market for new PhD economists:

To: Members of the American Economic Association
From: AEA Committee on the Job Market: John Cawley (chair), Elisabeth “Bitsy” Perlman, Al 
Roth, Peter Rousseau, Wendy Stock, and Stephen Wu
Date: December 1, 2025
Re: Survey of hiring plans of U.S. Economics Departments 

 

 

 

################

Also on the AEA website is this unprecedented announcement:

    Announcement      December 2, 2025

Statement from the American Economic Association

"The American Economic Association (AEA) has accepted Lawrence H. Summers' voluntary resignation from membership and, pursuant to the AEA's Policies, Procedures, and Code of Professional Conduct, has imposed a lifetime ban on his membership. In addition, effective immediately, the AEA has imposed a lifetime prohibition on Mr. Summers' attending, speaking at, or otherwise participating in AEA-sponsored events or activities, including serving in any editorial or refereeing capacity for AEA journals. The AEA condemns Mr. Summers' conduct, as reflected in publicly reported communications, as fundamentally inconsistent with its standards of professional integrity and with the trust placed in mentors within the economics profession. Consistent with longstanding AEA practices and to protect the integrity and confidentiality of AEA processes, the AEA will not comment further on individual matters or the specific considerations underlying this determination.

The AEA is committed to upholding the highest standards of professional conduct and to fostering a safe, respectful, and inclusive environment for all members of the economics community.  The AEA affirms its expectation that all members adhere to the AEA Code of Professional Conduct and the AEA Policy on Harassment, Discrimination, and Retaliation, and remains dedicated to maintaining professional environments in which economists of all backgrounds can participate fully, and with dignity and respect."

 
 

Philippe Aghion interview in the Financial Times

The FT has lunch with Philippe Aghion:

  Economist Philippe Aghion: ‘Macron’s legacy will be better than people think’
France’s new Nobel laureate on stimulating growth, the power of creative destruction — and why Karl Lagerfeld helped him with his homework by Ian Johnston

    “I would see politicians articulating economic reasonings and getting to opposite conclusions,” he recalls. “That’s how I came to economics. I need to understand the world to transform the world: that was my motivation.”
,,,

“Zucman would kill Mistral,” he says. “France just becomes a Camembert country. We’d just produce Camembert, which is great, but no more AI.”

,,,
     “I push the young people with me to be better than me,” he says. “That’s why I chose creative destruction, because the day I become obsolete, it validates the theory.”

 

Gender Differences in Economics Seminars (forthcoming in the AER)

 Economics seminars are complex, and not always tea parties. Here's a detailed look, by many investigators, via the analysis of many audio recordings.

Gender Differences in Economics Seminars∗
Pascaline Dupas Amy Handlan Alicia Sasser Modestino Muriel Niederle Mateo Sere Haoyu Sheng Justin Wolfers†
and the Seminar Dynamics Collective‡
 

Abstract
We assess whether men and women are treated differently when presenting their research in economics seminars. We collected data on every interaction between presenters and audience members across thousands of seminars, job market talks and conference presentations, leveraging both human judgment and audio processing algorithms to measure the number, tenor, tone and type of interruptions. Within a seminar series, women are interrupted more than men, and this finding holds when controlling for characteristics of the presenter and their paper topic and for audience size. Interruptions that may not be favorable to the presenter, such as those that are negative in tenor or tone, or cutoff the presenter mid-sentence, are common occurrences in economics seminars, and increase for women presenters. We also find greater engagement with female presenters in the form of larger, more diverse audiences, suggesting a potential role model effect. 

Job market advice for new Ph.D. economists, from John Cawley

 From applying for jobs, to signaling for interviews,  through interviews, flyouts, offers and the scramble, John Cawley, the chair of the American Economic Association's Committee on the Job Market has measured advice in this video.  If you're on the market this year, do yourself a favor (pour a stiff drink) and listen, not just to the beginning discussion of disruptions in demand thisyear, but to the whole thing.

    
2025 Webinar on the Economics PhD Job Market 

New Fellows of the Econometric Society

 The Econometric Society has announced the results of the 2025 election of new Fellows.

Congratulations to all of them. It's a great list, that includes important market designers and  experimental/behavioral economists.

"The Society is pleased to announce the election of 25 new Fellows of the Econometric Society. The 2025 Fellows of the Econometric Society follow. Atila Abdulkadiroglu, Duke University S. Nageeb Ali, Pennsylvania State University Heather Anderson, Monash University Debopam Bhattacharya, University of Cambridge Francis Bloch, Universite Paris 1 and Paris School of Economics Eric Budish, University of Chicago Booth School of Business Yi-Chun Chen, National University of Singapore Xavier D’Haultfoeuille, CREST-ENSAE Cecile Gaubert, University of California, Berkeley Bryan Graham, University of California, Berkeley Nathaniel Hendren, MIT Oscar Jorda, Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco/University of California, Davis Anil K Kashyap, University of Chicago Booth School of Business Jinwoo Kim, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology Frank Kleibergen, University of Amsterdam Ivana Komunjer, Georgetown University Leslie Marx, Duke University Edward Miguel, University of California, Berkeley Debasis Mishra, Indian Statistical Institute, Delhi Tymofiy Mylovanov, Kyiv School of Economics and University of Pittsburgh Fabrizio Perri, Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis David Romer, University of California, Berkeley Roland Strausz, Humboldt University of Berlin Francesco Trebbi, University of California, Berkeley Eyal Winter, Lancaster University and the Hebrew University" ########  In each of the years 2020-2024 the lists of new Fellows have been somewhat longer, and my sense is that we should keep trying to have longer lists, because we're  we're systematically missing many who would be jolly good Fellows.

Guido Imbens reflects on "What’s it like to win a Nobel Prize?

 What’s it like to win a Nobel Prize? 

"Stanford physical chemist W.E. Moerner, who received the 2014 Nobel Prize in chemistry, and Stanford economist Guido W. Imbens, who received the 2021 Nobel Memorial Prize in economic sciences, reflect on what changed – and what didn’t – after receiving the award."

"Where were you when you learned you had won?

Imbens: I was at home and was woken up by a call from Sweden. It’s just this very strange sensation as they tell you, “Congratulations, we’ve voted to award you the prize and we’re going to have a press conference in half an hour.” So you have this half hour where there’s nothing happening, but there’s also a lot happening. It was this very delightful, exciting moment when the rest of the world didn’t know yet. Once it was announced, there were telephone calls and interviews the whole night and morning. Stanford sent over a team for video, photos, and to help with the press. Our kids made pancakes for the Stanford crew, who had the idea of having the three kids interview me, and the video is an absolute highlight from that morning.

 ...

How did winning the prize change your life?

Imbens: It does change the way people outside of academics treat you, and it opens up a lot of new opportunities. The Swedes are very keen on having people take on this role model part, and they took us to high schools there to talk to the students. That was a very nice and fun experience. The attention and invitations die down, but as far as I hear from other people, it doesn’t really go away. It’s a permanent change.

Within the academic world, it doesn’t change things all that much. I still write my papers, I submit my papers, I get them rejected. But it has broadened my research and changed a little bit of what I try to do. I spend more time trying to leverage what I do by working with students and other groups to do what I can to push the field forward.

...

The Nobel Prize Museum in Stockholm exhibits artifacts from past laureates that offer a glimpse into their lives and work. What object did you donate?

Imbens: When I did the work with Josh Angrist for which I got the prize, we were living in Harvard faculty housing and we didn’t have laundry facilities there. On Saturday mornings we would go to the local laundromat and do our laundry. That’s where we worked on the paper for which we won the prize. So I donated a bottle of laundry detergent to the museum. Recently, the museum had an advertising campaign and they had posters with “the detergent that changed the world.”

###########

And here's an article in Nature about other science prizes, and how none of them have yet captured the world's attention the way the Nobels have:

These science prizes want to rival the Nobels: how do they compare?
By Chris Simms 

 

 

Citation laureates in Economics: Autor & Katz, Bertrand & Mullainathan, and Bloom

 Clarivate, the company that now maintains the Web of Science/Science Citation index, annually nominates very well cited economists (and academics in other fields that are celebrated by the Nobel Foundation).  Their idea, aside from celebrating very influential academics, is to perhaps predict who will win a Nobel, if not this year then sometime in the not too distant future.

"Since 2002, the Institute for Scientific Information has identified individuals whose contributions have reshaped their disciplines. Using a data-driven approach grounded in Web of Science citation analysis, we’ve recognized more than 450 Citation Laureates — 83 of whom have gone on to receive the Nobel Prize. Discover the full list of these exceptional researchers." 

 Here are their 2025 laureates in Economics (links on names point to their Web of Science page).  All of them look like worthy candidates for further celebration.

Citation Laureates 2025 in Economics
Celebrating economists whose research has reshaped policy, deepened insights into human behavior, and influenced global economic systems. 

"for seminal analysis of wage structure, earnings inequality, educational advance, and technological change"
 David Autor, United States and Lawrence F. Katz, United States

"for joint research on racial discrimination, corporate governance, and other aspects of labor economics determined by psychology and culture"
 Marianne Bertrand United States, and Sendhil Mullainathan  United States

"for analyzing the impact of economic and political uncertainty on investment, employment and growth"
Nicholas Bloom  United States 

NBER Market Design Working Group Meeting, Fall 2025, October 17-18, 2025, Cambridge, MA

 

NBER Market Design Working Group Meeting, Fall 2025,  October 17-18, 2025, Cambridge, MA
ORGANIZERS Eric Budish, Michael Ostrovsky, and Parag A. Pathak 

Friday, October 17

8:30 am

Continental Breakfast

9:00 am

The Structure of the Social Organization

Canice Prendergast, University of Chicago

The Impact of Race-Blind and Test-Optional Admissions on Racial Diversity and Merit

Allen Sirolly, Columbia University

Hongyao Ma, Columbia University

Yash Kanoria, Columbia University

10:30 am

Break

11:00 am

When Speed is of Essence: Perishable Goods Auctions

Isa E. Hafalir, University of Technology Sydney

Onur Kesten, The University of Sydney

Katerina Sherstyuk, University of Hawaii at Manoa

Cong Tao, University of Technology Sydney

Dynamic Threats to Credible Auctions

Martino Banchio, Bocconi University

Andrzej Skrzypacz, Stanford University

Frank Yang, Stanford University

12:30 pm

Lunch

2:00 pm

Centralizing Procurement: The Roles of Scale, Selection and Variety

Claudia Allende, Stanford University and NBER

Juan Pablo Atal, University of Pennsylvania and NBER

Rodrigo Carril, Universitat Pompeu Fabra

José Ignacio Cuesta, Stanford University and NBER

Andres Gonzalez-Lira, PUC-Chile

Missing Markets for Innovation: Evidence from New Uses for Existing Drugs

Eric Budish, University of Chicago and NBER

Maya M. Durvasula, Stanford University

Benjamin N. Roin, Independent Researcher

Heidi L. Williams, Dartmouth College and NBER

3:30 pm

Break

(30 minutes each)

4:00 pm

The Economics of Large Language Models: Token Allocation, Fine-Tuning and Optimal Pricing

Dirk Bergemann, Yale University

Alessandro Bonatti, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Alex Smolin, Toulouse School of Economics

Truthful Aggregation of LLMs with an Application to Online Advertising

Ermis Nikiforos Soumalias, University of Zurich

Michael J. Curry, Harvard University

Sven Seuken, University of Zurich

Auction Design for Artificial-Intelligence-Based Sponsored Search

Lawrence Ausubel, University of Maryland, College Park

5:30 pm

Adjourn

6:00 pm

Reception and Dinner - Royal Sonesta Hotel (Skyline Room)

Saturday, October 18

8:30 am

Continental Breakfast

9:00 am

The First-Price Principle of Maximizing Economic Objectives

Byeong-hyeon Jeong, University of Zurich

Marek Pycia, University of Zurich

Stable Matchings with Switching Costs

Boris Pittel, Ohio State University

Kirill Rudov, University of California, Berkeley

10:30 am

Break

11:00 am

The Importance of Being Earnest (in Search Markets)

Brendan Daley, University of Colorado, Boulder

Jacob Sagi, Kenan Flagler Business School, UNC Chapel Hill

Intermediaries in Bargaining: Evidence from Business-to-Business Used-Car Inventory Negotiations

Bradley Larsen, Washington University in St Louis and NBER

Carol Hengheng Lu, Amazon, Inc.

Anthony Lee Zhang, University of Chicago

12:30 pm

Adjourn