http://econ-www.mit.edu/about/around.htm
Economics Department is ranked top in the nation
(U.S. News and World Report, 2005)
Daron Acemoglu has been elected to the Council of the Econometric Society. He joins Abhijit Banerjee, whose term on the Council expires in 2007. Olivier Blanchard recently completed a term as a Council member.
The American Economics Association has announced the launch of four new journals, and two of the four will be edited by MIT faculty. Olivier Blanchard has been selected as the inaugural editor of the American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics and Esther Duflo will be the inaugural editor of American Economic Journal: Applied Economics. The journals will begin accepting submissions in the summer of 2007.
Daron Acemoglu has been named a co-editor of Econometrica effective July 2007. He joins Whitney Newey, who continues as a co-editor.
In December 2006, the MIT World Economy Laboratory (WEL) hosted a meeting in its Central Bank Research Network program. Top researchers from a number of central banks met with MIT faculty and graduate students for a lively discussion on policy-relevant issues such as exchange rate dynamics and the macroeconomics of oil.
Steve Ross received the Chicago Mercantile Exchange/Mathematical Sciences Research Institute Prize in Innovative Quantitative Applications for his "innovative work in arbitrage pricing theories."
MIT Class of
1998 Photos from Graduation:
http://kuznets.fas.harvard.edu/~athey/grad98/photos.html
MIT 14.121 Microeconomic Theory I
(graduate) (
14.121 Web Page)
MIT 14.129 Contract Theory (graduate) ( 14.129 Web
Page)
MIT 14.03 Intermediate Applied Microeconomics (undergraduate) ( 14.03 Web
Page)
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http://online.wsj.com/article/SB117708892644877101.html?mod=home_whats_news_us
Economist Breaks New Ground
As First Female Winner of Top Prize
By MARK WHITEHOUSE
April 21, 2007
The economics profession, long dominated by men, for the first time has given one of the discipline's top prizes to a woman.
The
American Economic Association announced Friday that Susan Athey, a 36-year-old
professor at Harvard
University with
professional interests ranging from deepest economic theory to Canadian timber
auctions, had won the prestigious John Bates Clark medal, awarded every two
years to the nation's most promising economist under the age of 40. No woman
had won the medal in its 60-year history.
Some past recipients have been chosen to spotlight a particular avenue of economic research, but that wasn't the case this time. Colleagues saw the medal as recognition of the breadth, depth and impact of Prof. Athey's wide-ranging body of work. They also saw it as an important signal of encouragement to other women, both already in the field and considering economics as a career.
"I'm amazed and thrilled," said Prof. Athey. "It's hard to believe my name will be added to such a distinguished list."
Recipients of the John Bates Clark medal don't get a large financial award, but it has often been a harbinger of greater things to come. Of the 29 previous winners, 11 have gone on to win the Nobel Prize in economics. Others have played major roles in government: Both Martin Feldstein and Joseph Stiglitz have headed the president's Council of Economic Advisors, and former Harvard President Lawrence Summers did a stint as Treasury Secretary. Steve Levitt, co-author of the bestselling book "Freakonomics," was also a Clark medalist.
The choice of Prof. Athey is "a very good thing" for economics, said John Roberts, a professor at Stanford Business School in California who advised on her doctoral dissertation. "The fraction of the economics profession that's female is discouragingly low, and Susan has worked hard to do something about that." As of 2006, about 8% of all full professors in Ph.D.-granting economics programs were female, according to the Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession.
Prof. Athey has been a rising star in economics since her doctoral dissertation -- on a new way to analyze how people respond to rising uncertainty -- created a stir on the academic job market in 1995, leading the nation's top economics departments to court her. She ultimately chose the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass., but later moved to Stanford and then last year returned to Cambridge to join Harvard. She is one of a number of female economists who have risen to prominence in recent years. They include MIT's Esther Duflo, who focuses on field experiments and development economics; Amy Finkelstein, also of MIT, who does health economics; and University of Chicago financial economist Monica Piazzesi.
"You can point to multiple fields of economics where one of the very top stars is a woman," Prof. Athey said. "That's been a really exciting change in the last five to 10 years."
Prof. Athey said she first took an interest in economics in the early 1990s when she was a junior at Duke University, making money on the side selling personal computers to the government at procurement auctions. Robert Marshall, a microeconomics specialist for whom she worked as a research assistant, suggested she help him look into a flaw she saw in the auctions: The low cost of disputing the results appeared to be encouraging losers to protest an inordinate number of outcomes, which often enabled them to get payments from the winners through legal settlements. The economists' research concluded that winners could be using the settlements to pay off losers for cooperating on bids -- a point Professor Marshall, now at Pennsylvania State University, argued in congressional testimony. Ultimately, the government scrapped the mechanism.
Prof. Athey's experience with Prof. Marshall showed her "the power of economic theory to change the world," she said. "By the time I finished working with him I was completely sold."
Prof. Athey went on to do widely respected work in the area of auctions -- a subfield of microeconomics that took center stage in the mid-1990s as former Soviet republics sold off state property and the U.S. government launched auctions for radio spectrum. She has extensively studied the ways in which bidders can collude to manipulate the results, and used that knowledge to help governments figure out how best to auction the rights to public resources. One piece of advice she offered: Use sealed bids, which her research has demonstrated will encourage more-competitive behavior among bidders.
Earlier this decade, she helped the Canadian government design timber auctions that as of 2006 had allowed it to reap some $1.1 billion of annual revenue from timber sales. The auctions also helped the Canadians defuse a big trade dispute with the U.S., which had accused Ottawa of effectively subsidizing timber exports.
Among her fellow economists, though, Prof. Athey is possibly more appreciated for her work to deepen and make more elegant the theories and methods economists use to model and measure the real world. While doing her Ph.D. dissertation at Stanford, for example, she developed a technique that allows economists to better understand how uncertainty -- about, say, oil prices or exchange rates -- affects the behavior of investors, businesses and the entire economy. The breakthrough, coming as it did from a 24-year-old student, took many in the profession by surprise.
"I remember being just totally stunned," said Paul Milgrom, a professor at Stanford who, together with Prof. Roberts, advised Ms. Athey on the project. "This was a problem that had occurred to me that I thought was just too hard."
Prof. Athey, who has two young children and is married to fellow Harvard economist Guido Imbens, has constantly found opportunities to encourage and recognize female participation in economics. When, for example, she was put in charge of organizing a winter 2006 meeting of the Econometric Society, she assembled a committee of 16 female economists to choose the papers that would be presented.
"It was a terrific committee with leading scholars in every area," she said. "The subtext is that this is possible."
Write to Mark Whitehouse at mark.whitehouse@wsj.com
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB117708892644877101.html?mod=home_whats_news_us
April 20, 2007
Harvard Economist Is First Woman to Win Prestigious John Bates Clark Medal
The John Bates Clark Medal, which is awarded every two years to a promising economist under the age of 40, has been given to Susan C. Athey, a professor of economics at Harvard University, the American Economic Association announced today.
The Clark Medal is widely regarded as the second most prestigious award in economics, after the Nobel. Previous winners, all of them men, include Milton Friedman, Paul Krugman, Steven Levitt, and Lawrence Summers. Watch this Web site for a more-detailed report on the award on Monday. —David Glenn
http://chronicle.com/news/index.php?id=2117