K. Daron Acemoglu Is Elizabeth and James Killian Professor Of

Total Page:16

File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb

K. Daron Acemoglu Is Elizabeth and James Killian Professor Of K. Daron Acemoglu is Elizabeth and James Killian Professor of Economics in the Department of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a member of the Economic Growth program of the Canadian Institute of Advanced Research. He is also affiliated with the National Bureau Economic Research, the Center for Economic Performance, the Center for Economic Policy Research, and Microsoft Research Center. He is an elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Econometric Society, the European Economic Association, and the Society of Labor Economists. Daron Acemoglu has received a BA in economics at the University of York, 1989, M.Sc. in mathematical economics and econometrics at the London School of Economics, 1990, and Ph.D. in economics at the London School of Economics in 1992. Since 1993, he has held the academic positions of Lecturer at the London School of Economics, and Assistant Professor, Pentti Kouri Associate Professor and Professor of Economics at MIT. He has received numerous awards and fellowships, including the award for best paper published in the Economic Journal in 1996 for his paper "Consumer Confidence and Rational Expectations: Are Agents' Beliefs Consistent With the Theory?", the inaugural T. W. Shultz Prize from the University of Chicago in 2004, and the inaugural Sherwin Rosen Award for outstanding contribution to labor economics in 2004, Distinguished Science Award from the Turkish Sciences Association in 2006, the John von Neumann Award, Rajk College, Budapest in 2007. He was also awarded the John Bates Clark Medal in 2005, given every two years to the best economist in the United States under the age of 40 by the American Economic Association, and holds an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Utrecht. He has given numerous seminars and keynote addresses, including the Review of Economic Studies lecture at the Royal Economic Society in 2001, the Alfred Marshall Lecture at the European Economic Association in 2003, the Astro-Zeneca Lecture in Stockholm in 2003, the Lionel Robbins Memorial Lectures at the London School of Economics in 2004, Society of Economic Dynamics Conference, 2004, European Association of Labor Economists Conference, 2004, Gaston Eyskens Lectures at the University of Leuven, Belgium, 2005, Dunaway Lecture at the Michigan State University in 2005, McKay Lecture, University of Pittsburgh in 2005, Woodward Lecture at the University of British Colombia in 2006, the David Kinley Lecture at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign in 2006, and keynote addresses to the Midwest Macroeconomics Conference, 2004, the Clarendon Lectures, Oxford University, 2007, the Inaugural Pareto Lecture, College Carlo Alberto, Torino in 2007, the Annual DEFAP Lecture, Milan Catholic University in 2007, the Calderwood Lecture, Wellesley College in 2007, the Malim Harding Lecture, University of Toronto in 2008. His work has been published in leading scholarly journals, including the American Economic Review, Econometrica, Journal of Political Economy, Quarterly Journal Economics and Review of Economic Studies. Daron Acemoglu's research covers a wide range of areas within economics, including political economy, economic development and growth, human capital theory, growth theory, innovation, search theory, network economics and learning. Daron Acemoglu is also the co-editor of Econometrica and of the National Bureau of Economic Research Macroeconomic Annual. Daron has recently completed a new book, along with Professor James Robinson (Harvard University), entitled Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty. .
Recommended publications
  • Handicapping Economics’ ‘Baby Nobel,’ the Clark Medal - Real Time E
    Handicapping Economics’ ‘Baby Nobel,’ the Clark Medal - Real Time E... http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2010/04/22/handicapping-economics-ba... More News, Quotes, Companies, Videos SEARCH Thursday, April 22, 2010 As of 4:16 PM EDT BLOGS U.S. Edition Today's Paper Video Blogs Journal Community Log In Home World U.S. Business Markets Tech Personal Finance Life & Style Opinion Careers Real Estate Small Business WSJ BLOGS Reserve Bank of India’s ‘Nirvana’ Rate Economic insight and analysis from The Wall Street Journal. APRIL 22, 2010, 4:04 PM ET Handicapping Economics’ ‘Baby Nobel,’ the Clark Medal Article Comments (1) REAL TIME ECONOMICS HOME PAGE » 1 of 3 4/22/2010 4:20 PM Handicapping Economics’ ‘Baby Nobel,’ the Clark Medal - Real Time E... http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2010/04/22/handicapping-economics-ba... Email Printer Friendly Permalink Share: facebook Text Size By Justin Lahart Friday, the American Economic Association will present the John Bates Clark medal, awarded to the nation’s most promising economist under the age of 40. The Clark is known as the “Baby Nobel,” and with good reason. Of the 30 economists who have won it, 12 have gone on to win the Nobel, including Paul Samuelson and Milton Friedman. The award was given biennially until last year, when the AEA decided to give it annually. Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist Esther Duflo, 37, is considered a frontrunner. The head of MIT’s Jameel Poverty Action Lab with Abhijit Banerjee, she’s been at the forefront of using randomized experiments to analyze development American Economic Association Most Popular programs.
    [Show full text]
  • Imperialism, Racism, and Fear of Democracy in Richard Ely's Progressivism
    The Rot at the Heart of American Progressivism: Imperialism, Racism, and Fear of Democracy in Richard Ely's Progressivism Gerald Friedman Department of Economics University of Massachusetts at Amherst November 8, 2015 This is a sketch of my long overdue intellectual biography of Richard Ely. It has been way too long in the making and I have accumulated many more debts than I can acknowledge here. In particular, I am grateful to Katherine Auspitz, James Boyce, Bruce Laurie, Tami Ohler, and Jean-Christian Vinel, and seminar participants at Bard, Paris IV, Paris VII, and the Five College Social History Workshop. I am grateful for research assistance from Daniel McDonald. James Boyce suggested that if I really wanted to write this book then I would have done it already. And Debbie Jacobson encouraged me to prioritize so that I could get it done. 1 The Ely problem and the problem of American progressivism The problem of American Exceptionalism arose in the puzzle of the American progressive movement.1 In the wake of the Revolution, Civil War, Emancipation, and radical Reconstruction, no one would have characterized the United States as a conservative polity. The new Republican party took the United States through bloody war to establish a national government that distributed property to settlers, established a national fiat currency and banking system, a progressive income tax, extensive program of internal improvements and nationally- funded education, and enacted constitutional amendments establishing national citizenship and voting rights for all men, and the uncompensated emancipation of the slave with the abolition of a social system that had dominated a large part of the country.2 Nor were they done.
    [Show full text]
  • John Harvard Scholarship, 1953–1954, 1954–1955 • Phi Beta Kappa, 1955 • Harvard College Scholarship, 1955–1956
    Ph.D. Economics FRANKLIN M. FISHER Harvard University Jane Berkowitz Carlton and Dennis William Carlton Professor of Microeconomics, Emeritus, Massachusetts Institute of M.A. Economics Technology Harvard University A.B. Economics Harvard University (summa cum laude) Ph.D. Dissertation A Priori Information and Time Series Analysis FELLOWSHIPS, SCHOLARSHIPS, AND PROFESSIONAL HONORS • Detur Prize, 1953 • Social Science Research Council Undergraduate Research Stipend, 1953 • John Harvard Scholarship, 1953–1954, 1954–1955 • Phi Beta Kappa, 1955 • Harvard College Scholarship, 1955–1956 • Rodgers Fellowship, 1956–1957 • Austin Fellowship, 1956–1957 • Junior Fellow of the Society of Fellows, Harvard University, 1957–1959 • Fellow of the Econometric Society, 1963–Present • Irving Fisher Lecturer at Econometric Society Meetings, Amsterdam, September 1968 • Operations Research Society of America Prize for best paper dealing with a military subject published in Operations Research, 1967 • Fellow of American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1969–Present • Council Member of the Econometric Society, 1972–1976 • John Bates Clark Award, American Economic Association, 1973 • F. W. Paish Lecturer, Association of University Teachers of Economics, Sheffield, England, April 1975 • Vice President of the Econometric Society, 1977–1978 • David Kinley Lecturer, University of Illinois, 1978 FRANKLIN M. FISHER Page 2 • President of the Econometric Society, 1979 • Fellowship, John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, 1981–1982 • Erskine Fellow, University of Canterbury, summer
    [Show full text]
  • Irving Fisher and His Compensated Dollar Plan
    Irving Fisher and His Compensated Dollar Plan Don Patinkin his is a story that illustrates the interrelationship between economic his- tory and economic thought: more precisely, between monetary history T and monetary thought. So let me begin with a very brief discussion of the relevant history. In 1879, the United States returned to the gold standard from which it had departed at the time of the Civil War. This took place in a period in which “a combination of events, including a slowing of the rate of increase of the world’s stock of gold, the adoption of the gold standard by a widening circle of countries, and a rapid increase in aggregate economic output, produced a secular decline ˙.. in the world price level measured in gold˙...” (Friedman and Schwartz 1963, p. 91; for further details, see Friedman 1990, and Laidler 1991, pp. 49–50). The specific situation thus generated in the United States was de- scribed by Irving Fisher (1913c, p. 27) in the following words: “For a quarter of a century—from 1873 to 1896—the dollar increased in purchasing power and caused a prolonged depression of trade, culminating in the political upheaval which led to the free silver campaign of 1896, when the remedy proposed was worse than the disease.” This was, of course, the campaign which climaxed with William J. Bryan’s famous “cross of gold” speech in the presidential election of 1896. Fisher’s view of this campaign reflected the fact that it called for the unlimited coinage of silver at a mint price far higher than its market value, a policy that would have led to a tremendous increase in the quantity of money and the consequent generation of strong inflationary pressures.
    [Show full text]
  • A Centennial History of the AAEA
    A CENTENNIAL HISTORY OFTHEAAEA Copyright 2010 Agricultural & Applied Economics Association. All rights reserved. No part of chis publication is to be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior permission in writing from the copyright holder. Contact [email protected] for permissions and/or more information. TABLE OF CONTENTS FOREWORD .................................................................vii PREFACE .................................................................... ix CHAPTER ONE • The Beginning .................................................. l CHAPTER TWO • From the American Farm Management Association To the American Farm Economics Association: How Mergers Happen .................................. 15 CHAPTER THREE • The Association Finds a Voice: The Journal ofFarm Economics ............25 CHAPTER FOUR• The 1930s: Depression, Dust, and Farm Policy ........................ .35 CHAPTER FIVE• The Inconvenience ofWar ........................................ 51 CHAPTER SIX • The Contest . ................................................ , ...65 CHAPTER SEVEN • Back to Business ..............................................71 CHAPTER EIGHT• Some Major Problems ..........................................87 CHAPTER NINE• Progress - the 1950s . ............................................99 CHAPTER TEN • Celebrating Fifty Years ........................................... 109 CHAPTER ELEVEN • Beginning the Second Fifty Years ................................ 117 CHAPTER TWELVE • Struggling to Serve a Diversity
    [Show full text]
  • By Way of Analogy: the Expansion of the Federal Government in the 1930S
    This PDF is a selection from an out-of-print volume from the National Bureau of Economic Research Volume Title: The Defining Moment: The Great Depression and the American Economy in the Twentieth Century Volume Author/Editor: Michael D. Bordo, Claudia Goldin and Eugene N. White, editors Volume Publisher: University of Chicago Press Volume ISBN: 0-226-06589-8 Volume URL: http://www.nber.org/books/bord98-1 Publication Date: January 1998 Chapter Title: By Way of Analogy: The Expansion of the Federal Government in the 1930s Chapter Author: Hugh Rockoff Chapter URL: http://www.nber.org/chapters/c6891 Chapter pages in book: (p. 125 - 154) 4 By Way of Analogy: The Expansion of the Federal Government in the 1930s Hugh Rockoff 4.1 Ideological Change and the Growth of the Federal Bureaucracy The major turning point in the growth of the federal government was, of course, the New Deal. A host of programs were added that in themselves ac- count for a substantial share of the growth of government in the twentieth cen- tury, and the propensity to add new programs increased. The New Deal was the result of a unique concatenation of forces: the unprecedented magnitude of the contraction, the political accident that the party favoring bigger government was out of power when the contraction began, and the unique personalities of Hoover and Roosevelt were among the most important. Moreover, as many historians of the Great Depression have recognized, there was an important ideological factor in the equation: intellectuals had already been converted to the cause of an expanded federal sector.
    [Show full text]
  • John Bates Clark As a Pioneering Neoclassical Economist Thomas C
    “A Certain Rude Honesty”: John Bates Clark as a Pioneering Neoclassical Economist Thomas C. Leonard John Bates Clark (1847–1938), the most eminent American economist of a century ago, was, in his own day, caricatured as an apologist for laissez-faire capitalism (Veblen 1908).1 The caricature has shown stay- ing power, a measure, perhaps, of the relative paucity of scholarship on Clark and his work. Recent Clark research signals a welcome attempt at a more accurate portrait (Morgan 1994; Henry 1995; Persky 2000). But some revisionists would remake Clark the apologist for capital into Clark the Progressive exemplar. Robert Prasch (1998, 2000), for exam- ple, depicts Clark as a Progressive paragon, which groups him with the greatreformers of Progressive-Era politicaleconomy—Social Gospel- ers such as Richard T. Ely and his protégé John R. Commons, labor leg- islation activists such as Clark’s junior colleague Henry Rogers Seager Correspondence may be addressed to Thomas C. Leonard, Department of Economics, Fisher Hall, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544; e-mail: [email protected]. I wish to ac- knowledge the gracious hospitality of Rolf Ohlsson and the Department of Economic History at Lund University, Lund, Sweden. This essay benefited from conversations with Benny Carls- son, the comments of Deirdre McCloskey and Bob Goldfarb, and the thoughtful criticisms of two anonymous referees. 1. All successful caricatures contain an element of truth, and Clark surely invited contro- versy when he argued thatworkers paid theirmarginal productgetwhatthey
    [Show full text]
  • To the John Bates Clark Medal Committee
    A Service of Leibniz-Informationszentrum econstor Wirtschaft Leibniz Information Centre Make Your Publications Visible. zbw for Economics Torgler, Benno Article Letter to the Editor: To the John Bates Clark Medal Committee Open Economics Provided in Cooperation with: De Gruyter Suggested Citation: Torgler, Benno (2019) : Letter to the Editor: To the John Bates Clark Medal Committee, Open Economics, ISSN 2451-3458, De Gruyter, Warsaw, Vol. 2, Iss. 1, pp. 40-42, http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/openec-2019-0004 This Version is available at: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/236596 Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen: Terms of use: Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Documents in EconStor may be saved and copied for your Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden. personal and scholarly purposes. Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle You are not to copy documents for public or commercial Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich purposes, to exhibit the documents publicly, to make them machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen. publicly available on the internet, or to distribute or otherwise use the documents in public. Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, If the documents have been made available under an Open gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort Content Licence (especially Creative Commons Licences), you genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. may exercise further usage rights as specified in the indicated licence. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ www.econstor.eu Open Economics 2019; 2: 40–42 Letter to the Editor Benno Torgler* To the John Bates Clark Medal Committee¹ https://doi.org/10.1515/openec-2019-0004 Received April 8, 2019; accepted April 26, 2019 Abstract: This humoristic piece pretends to offer a candidacy for the John Bates Clark Medal.
    [Show full text]
  • Joseph E. Stiglitz, 2001 Nobel Economic Sciences Laureate
    Joseph E. Stiglitz | October 5, 2012 2001 Nobel Economic Sciences Laureate University Professor, Columbia University Joseph E. Stiglitz is University Professor at Columbia University, the winner of the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2001, and a lead author of the 1995 IPCC report, which shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. He was chairman of the U.S. Council of Economic Advisers under President Clinton and chief economist and senior vice president of the World Bank during 1997–2000. Stiglitz received the John Bates Clark Medal, awarded biennially to the American economist under 40 who has made the most significant contribution to the subject. He was a Fulbright Scholar at Cambridge University, held the Drummond Professorship at All Souls College at the University of Oxford, and has also taught at MIT, Yale, Stanford, and Princeton. Stiglitz helped create a new branch of economics, "the economics of information," exploring the consequences of information asymmetries and pioneering such pivotal concepts as adverse selection and moral hazard, which have now become standard tools not only of theorists, but also of policy analysts. His work has helped explain the circumstances in which markets do not work well and how selective government intervention can improve their performance. At Columbia, Stiglitz co-chairs the Committee on Global Thought and is founder and co- president of the Initiative for Policy Dialogue. He is also president of the International Economic Association, co-chair of the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress, and chair of the Commission of Experts of the President of the United Nations General Assembly on Reforms of the International Monetary and Financial System.
    [Show full text]
  • Was John Bates Clark a Neoclassical Or a Progressive?
    A Certain Rude Honesty: Was John Bates Clark a Neoclassical or a Progressive? Forthcoming in History of Political Economy 34 Thomas C. Leonard Dept. of Economics Fisher Hall Princeton University Princeton, NJ 08544 [email protected] tel: (609) 258-4036 fax: (609) 258-5561 February 22, 2002 1 A Certain Rude Honesty: Was John Bates Clark a Neoclassical or a Progressive? Introduction In his own day, John Bates Clark (1847-1938) was caricatured as an apologist for laissez-faire capitalism (Veblen 1908).1 The caricature has shown staying power, a measure, perhaps, of the relative paucity of scholarship on Clark and his work. Recent Clark research signals a welcome attempt at a more rounded portrait of the most eminent American political economist of a century ago (Morgan 1994, Henry 1995, Persky 2000). But, as is routinely the case with revisionist work, some new scholarship goes too far. Some revisionists remake Clark the apologist for capital into its inverse – Clark the progressive exemplar. Prasch (1998, 2000), for example, depicts Clark as a progressive paragon, which groups him with the great reformers of Progressive-era political economy – Social Gospelers such as Richard T. Ely and his protégé John R. Commons, labor legislation activists such as Clark’s junior colleague Henry R. Seager and Commons’s student John B. Andrews, and Fabian socialists such as Sidney Webb. This paper argues that John Bates Clark is neither a partisan of Capital, as the caricature had it, nor a partisan of Labor, as were the progressives. Especially with respect to the leading issues of the day – labor relations and trust regulation – Clark is better regarded as a nascent American neoclassical, a partisan of what came to be called efficiency.
    [Show full text]
  • Esther Duflo: 2010 John Bates Clark Medalist
    Journal of Economic Perspectives—Volume 25, Number 3—Summer 2011—Pages 1–20 Esther Duflo: 2010 John Bates Clark Medalist Christopher Udry sther Duflo, winner of the 2010 John Bates Clark Medal, has made extraor- dinary contributions to development economics. Esther has focused on E topics that many economists think probably are central to understanding the differences in welfare between the high-income and low-income countries of the world: not only education, credit, food, and health, but also more nebulous concepts like social institutions and leadership. She has erected and inspired a research apparatus all over the developing world that seeks to address these ques- tions by integrating large-scale field experiments with economic theory to yield important insights for development policy and our understanding of behavior and institutions in developing countries. She exemplifies and has played a vital role in the exciting renaissance of development economics over the past decade. Esther was born in France, and received her B.A. in history and economics from the Ecole Normale Supérieure in 1994 and her Masters in Economics from DELTA in 1995. She did her Ph.D. in Economics at MIT, completing her doctorate in 1999. She roiled the economics establishment from the start of her career, with MIT breaking standard practice to offer an assistant professorship to one of its own students. In conversations with her at that time, I had to recognize that my efforts to recruit her to Yale instead were doomed to failure and agree with her reasoning that the environment that she had available to her at MIT was perhaps uniquely well-suited to her vision of the work she planned to do as an economist.
    [Show full text]
  • Social Welfare, Redistribution, and the Tradeoff Between Efficiency and Equity, with Developing Country Applications
    Social Welfare, Redistribution, and the Tradeoff between Efficiency and Equity, with Developing Country Applications Jon Bakija Williams College First Draft: August 2012 This Draft: August 2014 Abstract: The economic literature on “optimal income taxation” addresses the question of how to design tax and transfer policy so as to maximize “social welfare,” which is some function of the well- being of all members of society. It clarifies how the social-welfare-maximizing policy depends on one’s philosophy of distributive justice, and on empirical evidence about the behavioral response to incentives, and thus provides a systematic way of evaluating the tradeoff between equity and efficiency. Here, I explain the key insights of the optimal income taxation literature in a way that should be accessible to those with a familiarity with introductory economics, and then provide a brief introduction to some interesting pieces of evidence from around the world that are relevant to this question. 1 I. Social Welfare, the Tradeoff between Equity and Efficiency, and Optimal Income Taxation: Theory Introduction As Arthur Okun (1975) memorably put it, taxing the better-off to finance transfers to the worse- off is like “carrying water in a leaky bucket.” The leak represents the administrative costs of the tax and transfer system, and the deadweight losses caused by the fact that taxes and transfers distort incentives, causing people to change their behavior in an effort to reduce their tax bill or increase the transfer received. Different philosophies of distributive justice lead to different conclusions about how much of a leak we should be willing to accept before we stop carrying further buckets.
    [Show full text]