California’s Saez Wins Best Young Economist Award
Emmanuel Saez, a professor at the University of California in Berkeley who has done extensive work on income inequality, won the John Bates Clark medal for the economist under the age of 40 who contributed most to the field.
Saez, 36, “has distinguished himself through definitive contributions to the field of public economics,” the American Economic Association said in a statement today. It cited his work on taxation, income and wealth distribution and retirement plans.
Past winners of the award include Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Paul Samuelson, the late Milton Friedman and Lawrence Summers, who is now director of President Barack Obama’s National Economic Council. A Bloomberg News analysis found that recipients of the medal have a 39 percent chance of eventually winning the Nobel Prize in economics.
“What makes him unusual is that he’s a very strong economic theorist, but a lot of his work has important implications for policy,” said Alan Auerbach, a fellow professor at the University of California in Berkeley.
Saez couldn’t be reached for comment.
Joel Slemrod, a professor at the University of Michigan, said Saez had “painstakingly” documented the changing distribution of income and wealth in the U.S. and other countries over the 20th century.
Income Gap
In work that was criticized by some conservatives, including Alan Reynolds of the Cato Institute in Washington, Saez found that the top 1 percent of households by income accounted for close to 25 percent of total U.S. income in 2006, the highest proportion since the late 1920s.
His work also indicates that increases in marginal income- tax rates have less impact on the economy than previously thought. Rather than working less when faced with higher rates, people instead shelter their income from taxation, his research found payday loan lender.
“The work suggests that the economic cost of tax progressivity, while significant, is not as high as influential earlier research had suggested,” Slemrod said.
Saez has also investigated what makes people save. The association said his research found that both incentives and how they are presented can affect savings decisions.
In a field experiment with H&R Block Inc., Saez and his fellow authors offered taxpayers matching contributions if they put their refunds into Individual Retirement Accounts. His research found that savings subsidies are particularly effective when they are characterized as matches, the association said.
‘Path-Breaking Work’
“Saez has done path-breaking work on the theory of optimal taxation, as well as making major contributions to the empirical literature on the changing distribution of income,” said Gregory Mankiw, chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers under former President George W. Bush and a now a professor at Harvard University. “The prize is richly deserved.”
Saez, a French citizen who is a permanent U.S. resident, received a bachelor of arts from Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris in 1994, a master’s degree from DELTA in Paris in 1996 and a doctorate in economics from MIT in 1999. After spending three years as an assistant professor at Harvard University, he joined the University of California in Berkeley in 2002.
The John Bates Clark medal, started in 1947 as a biennial award, will now be awarded annually. It is named after U.S. economist John Bates Clark, who died in 1938 after spending most of his career teaching at Columbia University in New York.
Filed under: online by Wolf