Kevin Sontheimer (1938-2025)

 My old friend and colleague Kevin Sontheimer has died.  He was a great leader of Pitt’s economics department when I was there, not just while he was the department chair, but also before and after that too.

Here's his obit at Pitt:

Sontheimer transformed Pitt economics programs here and abroad
 

"Kevin Sontheimer, a 27-year faculty member who, as chairman, transformed the Department of Economics in the Dietrich School of Arts & Sciences and was instrumental in the founding of two pioneering international economics and management programs, died Feb. 3, 2025, at 86.

"His tenure as economics chair lasted through most of the 1980s. One of his early hires was future Nobel Prize-winning economist Alvin Roth as the first Mellon professorship at Pitt. “Kevin played a giant role in my decision to join the department in 1982,” Roth recalled. “He convinced me that, although the department had previously been somewhat under-resourced, it was a healthy department where it would be fun to work, with colleagues who would work together.

“And he was certainly right about that,” Roth continued. “During the time he was chair, we received permission to recruit fairly heavily, and successfully grew the department into a leading research department as well as a fine teaching department. I did some of the best work of my career at Pitt (1982-1998).

“One of the many things that Kevin did as chair was obtain a grant that allowed us to become one of the early economics departments to have an experimental laboratory. He built the department in other ways as well.”

"That included securing a Mellon Foundation grant to found, together with Jan Svenjar and Josef Zieleniec, the Center for Economic Research and Graduate Education (CERGE) at Charles University in Prague in 1991 (which became CERGE-EI in 1992, merging with the Economics Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences). He was also an instrumental part of the team from his department and the Katz Graduate School of Business to receive USAID grants to work with Academia Istropolitana Nova and other institutions in Bratislava, Slovakia, to set up their economics program as well as the program at Comenius University in Bratislava.

“Kevin was instrumental … a very, very important player in both of these efforts,” said Andrew R. Blair, professor emeritus of business administration and of economics at Katz and the College of Business Administration, and a close colleague of Sontheimer. “Kevin’s role in the Czech Republic and, most especially, the Slovakia relationships was absolutely vital to the success of these Pitt ventures in Central Europe, which were aimed at incorporating free markets in these countries after decades of operating under Soviet domination,” he added.

"While Sontheimer was economics chair, Blair was director of Katz’s International Business Center, and their cooperation was crucial in such efforts. Blair explained that Sontheimer in particular was “the driving force” behind the latter international program, “with Kevin serving both as co-director of the USAID grant implementation and also as resident director in Bratislava of the economics portion of the Comenius relationship. The idea was to train people who were already faculty members at these institutions, to teach with them over there, and to bring them over here” to Pittsburgh: “Without the grant we couldn’t possibly have done that.

“It was a pleasure to work with Kevin.”

"Kevin Charles Sontheimer was born on March 6, 1938, in Pittsburgh, earning his bachelor's degree in physics at Pitt in 1960, a master's degree in economics from Penn State University in 1963 and a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Minnesota in 1969.

"He began his academic career on the faculties of Virginia Tech and SUNY–Buffalo, then joined Pitt in 1978 until his retirement as professor emeritus in 2006. He was economics department chair for eight years.

"His own research focus was on microeconomic theory, which led to publications in Econometrica, Journal of Economic Theory and Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, as well as other leading academic publications in his field. He was also a visiting professor at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif., and at the University of Mannheim in Germany.

"He is survived by his wife of nearly 65 years, Carol Sontheimer; daughter Leigh Ellen Sontheimer; son Erik Sontheimer and daughter-in-law Catherine Brekus; son Steven Sontheimer and daughter-in-law Morgan Triplett; grandchildren Claire, Rachel and Tanner Sontheimer; brother Adrian (“Dink”) Sontheimer and sister Sue Wilmot.

"A gathering to celebrate Sontheimer’s life will be held at a later date. Memorial gifts are suggested to the Alzheimer's Association or the Department of Economics at Pitt. "

Philipp Strack, 2024 Clark Medalist by Drew Fudenberg, in the JEP

 Here's a celebration of Philipp Strack, the Yale economist who won the 2024 Clark Medal of the American Economic Association.

Philipp Strack, 2024 Clark Medalist  by Drew Fudenberg,  Journal of Economic Perspectives, vol. 39, no. 1, Winter 2025, (pp. 225–46)

Here are the first and last paragraphs:

"Philipp Strack is creative, insightful, and skillful, which has allowed him to make major contributions to many areas of microeconomic theory, including behavioral economics, information acquisition and learning, and mechanism design. Some of these papers provide a new understanding of important economics phenomena, others introduce results and techniques that will be used for years to come, and some of the papers do both. Together they have helped spark what his Clark Medal citation called a “new wave of information economics.”

 ...

"Philipp is one of the most cheerful and friendly people I know. I have greatly enjoyed working with and learning from him. He is also extraordinarily productive: as of June 2024, he had published 37 papers in the eleven years since the completion of his dissertation, with several others forthcoming. Of this output, my review has only covered some of the highlights. In addition to the work discussed here, Philipp has made contributions to the study of market design (in [11], with Jacob Leshno and [23], with Afshin Nikzad), on contests (in [15], with Dawei Fang and Thomas Noe and [1], with Christian Seel), on present bias (in [10], with Paul Heidhues), and on epidemics (in [12], with Thomas Kruse). Some of Philipp’s papers provide a new understanding of important economics phenomena, others introduce results and techniques that will be used for years to come, and many do both. All of his work is clear and insightful, and its influence seems sure to expand. "

Inputs to academic productivity, Part 2: Dissertation advisors (by Angrist and Diederichs)

  A new NBER working paper by Josh Angrist and Marc Diederichs looks at Ph.D. graduates of top Economics departments since 1994. The goal of the paper is to understand the advisor-student relationship, as part of the production function of producing top economists.  In an appendix (i.e. not the main point of the paper) they produce a long table ranking effective advisors, as measured by the success of their students.  I'm charmed to find that, through the magic of econometrics, they ranked me first.

A big part of my delight is that there are teachers up and down my family tree.  My parents, who were both high school teachers, would have been glad to see the table (and my mom would have believed in its accuracy and robustness to alternative specifications:)

 So, before I say more about the paper, here's the first page of their table (Table A2, p48-53, listing the first 180 advisors):

Now that we've gotten the important part out of the way, here's the paper:

DISSERTATION PATHS: ADVISORS AND STUDENTS IN THE ECONOMICS RESEARCH PRODUCTION FUNCTION by Joshua Angrist and Marc Diederichs, NBER Working Paper 33281, http://www.nber.org/papers/w33281 

Abstract: "Elite economics PhD programs aim to train graduate students for a lifetime of academic research. This paper asks how advising affects graduate students’ post-PhD research productivity. Advising is highly concentrated: at the eight highly-selective schools in our study, a minority of advisors do most of the advising work. We quantify advisor attributes such as an advisor’s own research output and aspects of the advising relationship like coauthoring and research field affinity that might contribute to student research success. Students advised by research-active, prolific advisors tend to publish more, while coauthoring has no effect. Student-advisor research affinity also predicts student success. But a school-level aggregate production function provides much weaker evidence of causal effects, suggesting that successful advisors attract students likely to succeed–without necessarily boosting their students’ chances of success. Evidence for causal effects is strongest for a measure of advisors’ own research output. Aggregate student research output appears to scale linearly with graduate student enrollment, with no evidence of negative class-size effects. An analysis of gender differences in research output shows male and female graduate students to be equally productive in the first few years post-PhD, but female productivity peaks sooner than male productivity. "

" Why do so few highly-selected elite program graduates follow the path to research success taken by their extraordinarily successful advisors? What aspects of economics advisee training might be
changed or enhanced so as to boost graduate student success and total research output?
These questions motivate our study of the economics PhD education production function at elite universities. The principal production inputs in this function are the faculty who teach and advise graduate students, along with aspects of the advising relationship that faculty and students develop together."

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Yesterday's post: Wednesday, January 22, 2025  Inputs to academic productivity, Part 1: Socioeconomic background (by Abramitzky et al.)

Another thought about Ph.D.s (and deciding whether to get one): Thursday, September 12, 2024 Should you get a Ph.D.?

and here are all my blog posts on students.