Congratulations to ESA award winners

 An email from the Economic Science Association (ESA) announces these new Fellows and award winners:

We are delighted to announce the recipients of the 2025 ESA Awards and the newest Fellows of the Economic Science Association. These awards recognize those who have made outstanding contributions to our field through research, service, mentoring, and leadership:

 

2025 ESA Distinguished Service Award
This award honours those who have played an exceptional role in the administration and growth of the ESA over the course of their careers. In 2025, we are proud to recognize two extraordinary recipients:

 

Professor Yan Chen
Professor Chen served as ESA President from 2015–2017. She established our mentoring program and served as the Director of the ESA Mentoring Program, a role she held until 2024. Through her efforts, hundreds of early career researchers have benefited from mentorship panels, helping to shape the next generation of experimental economists.

Professor Catherine Eckel
Professor Eckel served as ESA President from 2017–2019. Among her many contributions, she played a foundational role in establishing our ethics program, becoming ESA’s first Ethics Officer. She has been a dedicated mentor and advocate for junior scholars. Her leadership has been instrumental in making ESA a more inclusive and welcoming community for researchers at all stages of their careers.

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2025 ESA Young Scholar Prize
This prize recognizes a young scholar whose work has made a significant methodological contribution to experimental economics. Candidates must either be under the age of 40, hold an untenured position, or be within 10 years of completing graduate school. We are thrilled to announce the 2025 recipient:

Professor Christine Exley
Professor Exley is recognized for her research on motivated reasoning, charitable giving, and gender. Her work stands out for its innovative experimental designs, pushing the boundaries of how we study behaviour in complex social contexts.

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 2025 ESA Prize for Exceptional Achievement
This award honours a researcher who has overcome unusually challenging circumstances to make impactful contributions to experimental economics. We are very pleased to announce that the 2025 award goes to:

Professor Erin Krupka

Professor Krupka is widely known for her impressive work on social norms, including the development of incentivized norm elicitation techniques that have become a cornerstone in the field.

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2025 ESA Fellows
The designation of ESA fellow is intended to recognize the lifetime contributions of ESA members who have advanced the frontier of knowledge in economics through the use of laboratory and/or field experiments. The designation of an individual as an ESA fellow is intended as a permanent recognition of their contribution to experimental science and to economics.

We are delighted to welcome the following distinguished Professors as the 2025 ESA Fellows:

• Mark Isaac
• Rosemarie Nagel
• Robert Sugden
• Lise Vesterlund
• James Walker

Their body of work has significantly shaped experimental economics and will continue to inspire researchers across generations.

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The awardees and Fellows were selected by the 2025 ESA’s Awards and Fellows Committee. We extend our thanks to everyone who submitted nominations this year and encourage all ESA members to consider nominating deserving individuals for future awards and fellowships.

Please join me in congratulating this year’s outstanding scholars!

Lata Gangadharan (President, ESA)

Inputs to academic productivity, Part 1: Socioeconomic background (by Abramitzky et al.)

 Linking many data sources, Abramitzky et al. tell us about how family background predicts who become academics, what they study and how productive they are.

Climbing the Ivory Tower: How Socio-Economic Background Shapes Academia by Ran Abramitzky, Lena Greska, Santiago Pérez, Joseph Price, Carlo Schwarz & Fabian Waldinger , NBER Working Paper 33289, DOI 10.3386/w33289, December 2024

Abstract: "We explore how socio-economic background shapes academia, collecting the largest dataset of U.S. academics’ backgrounds and research output. Individuals from poorer backgrounds have been severely underrepresented for seven decades, especially in humanities and elite universities. Father’s occupation predicts professors’ discipline choice and, thus, the direction of research. While we find no differences in the average number of publications, academics from poorer backgrounds are both more likely to not publish and to have outstanding publication records. Academics from poorer backgrounds introduce more novel scientific concepts, but are less likely to receive recognition, as measured by citations, Nobel Prize nominations, and awards."

"Our measure of socio-economic background is the percentile rank of their father’s predicted income when the future academics were growing up. ... we link academics in six scientific disciplines – medicine, biology, biochemistry, chemistry, physics, and mathematics to their publication and citation records using data from the Clarivate Web of Science. Overall, our data enable us to measure the socio-economic backgrounds of 46,139 academics (for 15,521 of whom we also have publication and citation data) across 1,026 universities over nearly seven decades

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"We find a stark underrepresentation of individuals from lower socio-economic backgrounds: those born to parents in the bottom quintile of the parental income distribution account for less than 5% of all  academics. In contrast, around half of U.S. academics come from the top quintile of the income rank distribution. Children born to the highest-earning fathers are particularly overrepresented, with those born to fathers in the 100th percentile having a 56% higher chance of becoming an academic than those born to fathers in the 99th percentile. The underrepresentation of low socio-economic status  ndividuals in academia is greater than in other occupations that require specialized training, such as medicine and law. 

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"We find that scientists whose fathers were at the 75th percentile of the income rank are around 0.6 percentage points (or 50%) more likely to be nominated for a Nobel Prize than scientists with fathers at the 25th percentile. They are also 50% more likely to be awarded a Nobel Prize. These differences persist even if we control for scientists’ publication and citation records. 

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"representation from the bottom quintile of the parental SES rank distribution is especially low in academia: only 5% of academics come from the bottom quintile, while 7% of lawyers, and 9% of doctors come from the bottom quintile.  Teachers, in contrast, exhibit a much weaker degree of selection based on socio-economic background."