Showing posts with label prizes. Show all posts

Wednesday, October 16, 2024

New fellows of the Econometric Society

Congratulations to the 42 newly elected Fellows of the Econometric Society. That's up from 29 new Fellows elected in 2023, which is a step towards the goal (about which I blogged last year*) of electing more Fellows. But elections depend on recognition that isn't equally available to every specialty and geography, so there are still many nominees and others who would be jewels in the crown of the Society.

"The Society is pleased to announce the election of 42 new Fellows of the Econometric Society. The 2024 Fellows of the Econometric Society follow.

Jerome Adda, Bocconi University

Cristina Arellano, Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis (Secondary affiliation: Latin America)

Costas Arkolakis, Yale University

John Asker, University of California, Los Angeles (Secondary affiliation: Australasia)

David Atkin, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Paul Beaudry, University of British Columbia

Sascha O. Becker, University of Warwick and Monash University

Sandra E. Black, Columbia University

Estelle Cantillon, Universite Libre de Bruxelles

Alessandra Casella, Columbia University

Thomas Chaney, University of Southern California

David Dorn, University of Zurich

Janice Eberly, Northwestern University, Kellogg School of Management

Kfir Eliaz, Tel Aviv University

Erica Field, Duke University

Andrea Galeotti, London Business School

Francisco Gallego, Pontificia Universidad Caatolica de Chile

Maitreesh Ghatak, London School of Economics (Secondary affiliation: Asia)

Olivier Gossner, CNRS - CREST; London School of Economics

Ayşe Ökten İmrohoroğlu, University of Southern California

Henrik Kleven, Princeton University

Kala Krishna, The Pennsylvania State University

Jeanne Lafortune, Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile

Francesco Lippi, LUISS University; Einaudi Institute for Economics and Finance

Deborah J. Lucas, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Annamaria Lusardi, Stanford University

N. Gregory Mankiw, Harvard University

Kalina Manova, University College London

Elena Manresa, New York University

Enrique G. Mendoza, University of Pennsylvania (Secondary affiliation: Latin America)

Ismael Y. Mourifie, Washington University in St Louis (Secondary affiliation: Africa)

Barry Nalebuff, Yale School of Management

Andrew Newman, Boston University

Efe A. Ok, New York University

Guillermo Ordonez, University of Pennsylvania

Maria Petrova, Universitat Pompeu Fabra

Mar Reguant, IAE-CSIC; Northwestern University

Diego Restuccia, University of Toronto

Andrés Rodríguez-Clare, University of California, Berkeley (Secondary affiliation: Latin America)

Andrea Weber, Central European University

Luigi Zingales, University of Chicago Booth School of Business

Gabriel Zucman, Paris School of Economics; University of California, Berkeley

Finally, the Society would like to express its gratitude to the members of the 2024 Fellows Nominating Committee: Jan Eeckhout (chair), Mariacristina De Nardi, Marcela Eslava, Richard Holden, Yuichi Kitamura, Yaw Nyarko, and Nathan Nunn."

As I wrote last year, Congratulations again to the new Fellows, who have received the carefully considered and frugally awarded applause of their peers.

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*Last year:

Tuesday, October 10, 2023

Econometric Society Fellows (2023), procedures, and some thoughts on prizes in general

Monday, July 29, 2024

Nobel prize medals at auction---two for chemistry (1996 and 1966)

For charity, to clean up estates of the departed, and for other reasons, Nobel prize medals are sometimes sold at auction. Here are two recent auctions (conducted in March and July of this year) for chemistry medals from 1996 (for Robert Curl) and 1966 (for Robert Mulliken), both conducted by the Nate D. Sanders auction company.

Lot #1: Nobel Prize in Chemistry Awarded to Robert F. Curl, Jr. -- Curl Discovered ''Buckyballs'', a Carbon Nanoparticle Transforming Energy, Disease Treatment & Space Exploration via Space Elevators

Lot #11: Nobel Prize Awarded to ''Mr. Molecule'' Robert S. Mulliken -- Mulliken Invented Molecular Orbital Theory, the Revolutionary Equation that Unified Quantum Physics & Chemistry

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Some earlier auctions:

Wednesday, June 22, 2022

Russian Journalist’s Nobel Medal Sells for $103.5 Million, with proceeds to UNICEF for Ukrainian refugees.

Saturday, October 26, 2019

Auction results: Nobel medals of John Nash and Reinhard Selten

Saturday, September 3, 2016

Sotheby's to Offer John F. Nash, Jr.'s 1994 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences

Tuesday, October 11, 2016 John F. Nash, Jr.'s 1994 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences medal and memorabilia: Auction at Sotheby's

Sunday, April 28, 2019 Hayek at auction at Sothebys

Thursday, October 27, 2016 Re-auction of Kenneth Wilson's, 1982 Nobel medal for Physics

Thursday, February 26, 2015 Kuznets' Nobel Prize medal auction

Tuesday, March 5, 2013 Nobel medal and diploma of Francis Crick: available at auction

Tuesday, April 23, 2013 Crick's Nobel medal, and letter to his son describing DNA

Thursday, May 28, 2015 The auction of Lederman's Nobel medal goes into extended bidding

Tuesday, October 10, 2023

Econometric Society Fellows (2023), procedures, and some thoughts on prizes in general

The Econometric Society has announced its newest class of Fellows. I don't know them all, but I bet they all deserve that distinction, because it isn't easy to be recognized as a Fellow. More on that after celebrating and congratulating these jolly good Fellows:

The Society is pleased to announce the election of 29 new Fellows of the Econometric Society.

Nava Ashraf, London School of Economics
Steve Bond, University of Oxford
Tilman Börgers, University of Michigan
Robin Burgess, London School of Economics
Gabriel Carroll, University of Toronto
Yongsung Chang, Seoul National University/Bank of Korea
Dean Corbae, University of Wisconsin – Madison
Mariacristina De Nardi, University of Minnesota
Ben Golub, Northwestern University
Christian Hellwig, Toulouse School of Economics
Michael Jansson, University of California, Berkeley
Steven Koch, University of Pretoria
Thierry Mayer, Sciences Po
Hyungsik Roger Moon, University of Southern California/Yonsei University
Georg Nöldeke, University of Basel
Emanuel Ornelas, Sao Paulo School of Economics – FGV
Pietro Ortoleva, Princeton University
Sven Rady, University of Bonn
Gil Riella, School of Public Policy & Government - FGV
Uta Schönberg, University of Hong Kong/UCL
Katsumi Shimotsu, University of Tokyo
Marciano Siniscalchi, Northwestern University
Vasiliki Skreta, University of Austin, Texas/UCL
Zheng Song, Chinese University of Hong Kong
Yves Sprumont, Deakin University
Abderrahim Taamouti, University of Liverpool Management School
Pierre-Olivier Weill, University of California, Los Angeles
Wei Xiong, Princeton University
Motohiro Yogo, Princeton University

The 2023 FNC consisted of Gabrielle Demange (Chair) Irene Brambilla, Richard Holden, Dilip Mookherjee, Whitney Newey, Michele Terlit, and Yaw Nyarko.

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The great thing about prizes and other recognitions is that they celebrate the accomplishments of the accomplished. The complicated thing about them is that they inevitably leave out many whose accomplishments are deserving of similar celebration.

What makes the Econometric Society Fellows such an interesting recognition is that its procedures are transparent: it's a nomination process followed by an election, and the electorate is the collection of existing Fellows. I participate each year by nominating several Fellows, and then voting for quite a few more.

One flaw in such a system could be that the existing fellows, who initiate many of the nominations, might find it easier to think of people close to them in some sense than to think of equally deserving candidates who aren't so close. The Fellows Nominating Committee (FNC) is an attempt to address this: their job includes nominating deserving candidates who seem likely to have been overlooked, perhaps because they are from parts of the world that seem underrepresented among the existing Fellows.

Each year the number of nominees is a multiple of the number of elected Fellows (if memory serves only around a fifth of the nominees have been elected in recent years). The rules of the election since 2020 are that the threshold to get elected is to be included in 25% of the votes cast (and a single "vote" if I understand correctly is a list submitted by a Fellow that can contain as many of the nominated candidates as he or she wishes to vote for). I say "since 2020" because it is the sense of many of the past and present officers of the Society that we elect too few Fellows each year, and so the threshold has been dropping in an effort to elect more fellows. But the equilibrium response of the voters seems to be to vote for a smaller proportion of the nominees, so that the number of new fellows doesn't seem to be increasing at the hoped for rate.

I don't know of a good model to explain all this, but it might include some notion that the value of being a Fellow (or of receiving other recognition) is a non-monotone function of its scarcity. If we elect too many new Fellows, this might eventually diminish the value (to existing Fellows) of being a Fellow. But (less obviously), if we elect too few Fellows the same thing could happen, if being a Fellow stops being something that people aspire to or even have heard of.

My sense is that being a member of the National Academies is less important among economists than in many sciences precisely because too few economists are elected, so that it comes to seem like a random recognition rather than one that recognizes success as economists define it. One of the reasons that the economics Nobel, awarded yesterday with much fanfare to Claudia Goldin, is so widely applauded, not just in the disciplines in which Nobels are awarded but among the general public as well, is that Nobels are awarded every year in several disciplines, so that they manage to be both a scarce distinction and a familiar one. (Exceptions that test this rule are the Clark medal, awarded each year by the American Economic Association to an economist younger than 40, which has high prestige among American economists even though so few are well recognized enough at that age to be serious contenders, and the Fields medals of the International Mathematical Union, also awarded to up to four scholars under 40, every four years.)

But nothing is perfect. Congratulations again to the new Fellows, who have received the carefully considered and frugally awarded applause of their peers.

Friday, October 14, 2022

Scientific honors and gender gaps

Changing from an old equilibrium to a new one can involve some actions that may not persist once a new equilibrium is reached. Here's a paper on the awarding of scientific honors.

Gender Gaps at the Academies by David Card, Stefano DellaVigna, Patricia Funk & Nagore Iriberri

NBER WORKING PAPER 30510 DOI 10.3386/w30510 September 2022

"Historically, a large majority of the newly elected members of the National Academy of Science (NAS) and the American Academy of Arts and Science (AAAS) were men. Within the past two decades, however, that situation has changed, and in the last 3 years women made up about 40 percent of the new members in both academies. We build lists of active scholars from publications in the top journals in three fields – Psychology, Mathematics and Economics – and develop a series of models to compare changes in the probability of selection of women as members of the NAS and AAAS from the 1960s to today, controlling for publications and citations. In the early years of our sample, women were less likely to be selected as members than men with similar records. By the 1990s, the selection process at both academies was approximately gender-neutral, conditional on publications and citations. In the past 20 years, however, a positive preference for female members has emerged and strengthened in all three fields. Currently, women are 3-15 times more likely to be selected as members of the AAAS and NAS than men with similar publication and citation records."

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That paper is a followup to their previous paper on Econometric Society Fellows, which has just come out in the current issue of Econometrica:

ECONOMETRICA: SEP 2022, VOLUME 90, ISSUE 5

Gender Differences in Peer Recognition by Economists

https://doi.org/10.3982/ECTA18027
p. 1937-1971

David Card, Stefano DellaVigna, Patricia Funk, Nagore Iriberri

We study the selection of Fellows of the Econometric Society, using a new data set of publications and citations for over 40,000 actively publishing economists since the early 1900s. Conditional on achievement, we document a large negative gap in the probability that women were selected as Fellows in the 1933–1979 period. This gap became positive (though not statistically significant) from 1980 to 2010, and in the past decade has become large and highly significant, with over a 100% increase in the probability of selection for female authors relative to males with similar publications and citations. The positive boost affects highly qualified female candidates (in the top 10% of authors) with no effect for the bottom 90%. Using nomination data for the past 30 years, we find a key proximate role for the Society's Nominating Committee in this shift. Since 2012, the Committee has had an explicit mandate to nominate highly qualified women, and its nominees enjoy above‐average election success (controlling for achievement). Looking beyond gender, we document similar shifts in the premium for geographic diversity: in the mid‐2000s, both the Fellows and the Nominating Committee became significantly more likely to nominate and elect candidates from outside the United States. Finally, we examine gender gaps in several other major awards for U.S. economists. We show that the gaps in the probability of selection of new fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences closely parallel those of the Econometric Society, with historically negative penalties for women turning to positive premiums in recent years.

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Update: here's the published version of the NBER paper, in PNAS, JANUARY 24, 2023, VOL. 120, NO. 4:

Gender gaps at the academies

David Card https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6914-6698 card@econ.berkeley.edu, Stefano DellaVigna, Patricia Funk, and Nagore Iriberri

This contribution is part of the special series of Inaugural Articles by members of the National Academy of Sciences elected in 2021. January 19, 2023 120 (4) e2212421120

https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2212421120

Wednesday, June 22, 2022

Russian Journalist’s Nobel Medal Sells for $103.5 Million, with proceeds to UNICEF for Ukrainian refugees.

The NYT has the story: it exemplifies quite a number of things (including jump bidding in a reserve price charity auction...)

Russian Journalist’s Nobel Medal Sells for $103.5 Million. Dmitri A. Muratov, the editor of the independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta, will donate proceeds to UNICEF to help Ukrainian child refugees. By Kalia Richardson

"The Nobel Peace Prize put up for auction by the Russian journalist Dmitri A. Muratov to help Ukrainian refugees sold Monday night for $103.5 million to an anonymous buyer, obliterating the record for a Nobel medal.

"The proceeds from the auction will go to UNICEF to aid Ukrainian children and their families displaced by Russia’s invasion of their country.

"Mr. Muratov is the editor in chief of the independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta, which suspended publication in March in response to the Kremlin’s increasingly draconian press laws. In an interview with The New York Times last month, he said he was inspired to auction the award he won last year by the Danish physicist Niels Bohr, who sold his medal to help civilian relief in Finland following the Soviet invasion of that country in 1939.

...

"The previous record for auctioning off a Nobel medal came in 2014, when the prize belonging to James Watson, who shared in the discovery of the double-helix structure of DNA, sold for $4.1 million ($4.76 million, including the commission that goes to the auction house).

"Heritage Auctions, which handled the sale of Mr. Muratov’s medal, has sold five former Nobel Prizes, including the one awarded to Watson’s co-discoverer, Francis Crick. That medal sold for $2.27 million in 2013.

"Josh Benesh, the chief strategy officer for Heritage Auctions, which will not take a commission on the sale, said he was flabbergasted by the final price. The bidding had been mainly cruising along in increments of $100,000 or $200,000 when it suddenly spiked from $16.6 million to $103.5 million. Gasps filled the room when a Heritage Auctions employee manning the phone relayed the figure"

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Here's the Heritage Auction site:

The Dmitry Muratov Nobel Peace Prize Charity Auction to Benefit UNICEF's Child Refugee Fund #790 / Lot #1

Here are some posts about earlier sales of Nobel prize medals, some by economists:

Saturday, October 26, 2019

Auction results: Nobel medals of John Nash and Reinhard Selten

Saturday, September 3, 2016

Sotheby's to Offer John F. Nash, Jr.'s 1994 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences

Tuesday, October 11, 2016 John F. Nash, Jr.'s 1994 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences medal and memorabilia: Auction at Sotheby's

Sunday, April 28, 2019

Hayek at auction at Sothebys

Thursday, October 27, 2016 Re-auction of Kenneth Wilson's, 1982 Nobel medal for Physics

Thursday, February 26, 2015 Kuznets' Nobel Prize medal auction

Tuesday, March 5, 2013 Nobel medal and diploma of Francis Crick: available at auction

Tuesday, April 23, 2013 Crick's Nobel medal, and letter to his son describing DNA

Saturday, April 2, 2022

Science Talent Search in the schools, after 100 years

When I was in high school in the 1960's, I participated in a long-established student competition called the Science Talent Search, which in those days was sponsored by Westinghouse. In subsequent years it was sponsored by Intel, and lately by Regeneron. Winners of the competition were feted in Washington and received college scholarships, but it was a fun experience also for the many more of us who just got to spend time studying and building things that helped us appreciate science.

It turns out that that competition is 100 years old now. Here's a press release, and here's a searchable site of notable alumni, among whom are two winners of the Fields Medal, and fourteen Nobel prize winners, so far. The site doesn't identify which noted alumni won awards as students, but my guess is that for most of us participation itself was the prize. And I wonder what can be learned about science and math education from these competitions. (My sense is that you can certainly learn something about American immigration, and about the growing participation of girls and women from the student participants and prizewinners, and the notable alums in each decade...)

Here are this year's student winners: Students Win $1.8 Million at Regeneron Science Talent Search 2022 for Exceptional Research on Neutron Star—Black Hole Systems, Narrowband Radar, and Ribosome Movement in Protein Translation

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Earlier:

Friday, March 19, 2021

Matching theorist wins high school science talent search

Tuesday, January 30, 2018

Science talent search finalists (and some alumni)

Thursday, November 25, 2021

Promoting Quality in Research: the inaugural Einstein Foundation Awards, 2021

I had the privilege of being a member of the jury for the Einstein Foundation Awards, which were awarded yesterday for the first time.

Here's the award booklet:

EINSTEIN FOUNDATION AWARD 2021 PROMOTING QUALITY IN RESEARCH

Individual Award 2021: Paul Ginsparg

"Preprints have been shared in the physics community since the early 1950s but mostly among well established professors. Physicist Paul Ginsparg, who receives the Einstein Foundation’s Individual Award, set out to democratize access to scientific results. Today, his preprint server arXiv has spread to many other fields—and made science progress more efficient and fairer."

Institutional Award 2021: The Center for Open Science

"Open research is on the rise, but a lot of research information still remains behind closed doors. The Center for Open Science, recipient of the Institutional Award, advocates for more transparency and open access, training scientists, publishers and funders, providing technology and policy recommendations. With this multi pronged approach, it has helped create an open science community which is becoming ever more self-sustaining."

Early Career Researcher Award 2021: "ManyBabies5: Teaming up for Developmental Science → manybabies.github.io/MB5

"Unlike adult subjects, babies cannot tell you what they are thinking. Therefore, researchers studying infant development use looking patterns to understand how babies think and feel about the world. “An overwhelming majority of studies use looking time to make inferences about infant cognition,” comments Martin Zettersten from Princeton University in the United States. But what exactly is it that drives babies to pay attention to different things? To come up with a statistically sound answer to this question, he and his colleague Jessica Kosie initiated ManyBabies5, a large international consortium of infant researchers. “We aim to increase diversity amongst researchers and test subjects alike and collaboratively want to come up with the best test possible on how different factors matter in infant looking time,” Jessica Kosie explains. To that end, the ManyBabies team will put together a diverse and sizeable sample of infants around the world. “To me, team science is a useful tool for producing high quality, robust science,” says Martin Zettersten. “Embracing this approach as a field as many groups are doing right now—that feels revolutionary to me.”

THE JURY The Einstein Foundation Council has convened an outstanding group of scholars representing the natural sciences, the humanities, and the social sciences. The international jury is presided over by Dieter Imboden and both defines the objectives of the award and selects the awardees. The following jury members have been appointed for the first three year term: DIETER IMBODEN (President), PhD, Theoretical Physics; Professor Emeritus of Environmental Physics, ETH Zürich; DOROTHY BISHOP, PhD, Neuropsychology; Professor of Developmental Neuropsychology, Oxford University; ALASTAIR BUCHAN, MD, PhD, Medicine; Professor of Stroke Medicine, Oxford University; MICHEL COSNARD, PhD, Computer Science; Professor Emeritus of Informatics, Université de Côte d’Azur; LORRAINE DASTON, PhD, History of Science; Director Emerita of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science Berlin; MOSHE HALBERTAL, PhD, Philosophy; Professor of Jewish Thought and Philosophy, Hebrew University; LENA LAVINAS, PhD, Economics; Professor of Welfare Economics, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro; JULIE MAXTON, PhD, Law; Executive Director of the Royal Society, London; MARCIA MCNUTT, PhD, Geophysics; President of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States; EDWARD MIGUEL, PhD, Economics; Professor of Environmental and Resource Economics, University of California, Berkeley; ALVIN ROTH, PhD, Economics; Professor of Economics, Stanford University; SOAZIC ELISE WANG SONNE, Economist, World Bank Group; PhD Fellow, United Nations University; SUZY STYLES, PhD., Psychology; Professor of Psycholinguistics, Nanyang Technological University; E. JÜRGEN ZÖLLNER, Dr. Dr. h.c. mult., Medicine; Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Stiftung Charité, Senator (ret.), Berlin

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Here's my earlier description of the award:

Saturday, December 12, 2020

The Einstein Foundation Award for Promoting Quality in Research (apply or nominate now...)

Tuesday, April 28, 2020

AEA Awards: Clark Medal and Distinguished Fellows

Here's the AEA announcement:

2020 American Economic Association Awards
Congratulations to the 2020 John Bates Clark Medalist, Melissa Dell, and to the newly elected Distinguished Fellows: Katharine Abraham, Shelly Lundberg, Paul Milgrom, and Whitney Newey. View the Press Release for all award announcements.

Melissa Dell, Clark Medalist 2020

Distinguished Fellows
The Award of Distinguished Fellow was instituted in 1965. Past Presidents of the Association and Walker Medalists shall be Distinguished Fellows. Additional Distinguished Fellows may be elected, but not more than four in any one calendar year from economists of high distinction in the United States and Canada. The following economists have received this award:

2020

Saturday, October 26, 2019

Auction results: Nobel medals of John Nash and Reinhard Selten

The auction is over, and (unlike in some previous auctions) all of the items sold. The highest profile items, namely the Nobel medals and diplomas, went for $735,000 (Nash) and 225,000 (Selten).