October 6, 2005

Faculty honors

The IZA Prize in Labor Economics 2005 has been awarded to Dale T. Mortensen, Ida C. Cook Professor of Economics and director of the Mathematical Methods in the Social Sciences Program, by the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), Bonn Germany.

He shares the award with Christopher A. Pissarides, professor of economics and director of the Research Program on Technology and Growth at the Centre for Economic Performance at the London School of Economics.

The award, to be presented Oct. 24 in Berlin, recognizes their pioneering work that has revolutionized theoretical and empirical labor market research.

The literature stimulated by their contributions to search and matching theory is evidence of the power of their approach to the analysis of interactions in labor markets, marriage markets, housing markets, or generally in all markets with frictions, according to the IZA. Their contributions and development of a dynamic equilibrium model of labor markets account for much of the success of job search theory and the flows approach in becoming a leading tool for microeconomic and macroeconomic analysis of labor markets.

Their models, now widely used in labor economics and macroeconomics, have enriched research on unemployment as an equilibrium phenomenon, on labor market dynamics and cyclical adjustment.

Mortensen’s classic article “Job Search, the Duration of Unemployment, and the Phillips Curve” that labor market frictions can be represented by stochastically arriving matching opportunities has provided thrust to the idea that searching for wage offers and jobs is costly when workers and firms lack full information about labor market prices.

Richard Kieckhefer, professor of religion and of history, has been named the John Evans Professor in Religion.

A historian of Christianity who works mainly on the late Middle Ages in Western Europe, Kieckhefer has conducted research on various aspects of late medieval religious culture, including mystical theology, sainthood, and heresy and its repression.

He is widely known for his work on late medieval witchcraft and magic, and currently is developing his interest in church architecture as an area for research.

Thomas Meade, professor of chemistry, biochemistry, molecular and cell biology, neurobiology and physiology, and radiology, has been named the first Eileen Foell Professor in Cancer Research.

Meade’s research focuses on coordination chemistry and its application in bioinorganic problems that include biological molecular imaging, electron transfer processes and the development of electronic biosensors for the detection of DNA and proteins.

His work, which is supported by the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation and the National Cancer Institute, is leading to new and more sensitive methods to detect early-stage tumors. He holds more than 50 patents, with 90 more pending.