The Erwin Plein Nemmers Prize in Economics

2008: Paul R. Milgrom

2006: Lars Peter Hansen

2004: Ariel Rubinstein

2002: Edward C. Prescott

2000: Daniel L. McFadden

1998: Robert J. Aumann

1996: Thomas J. Sargent

1994: Peter A. Diamond

Paul R. Milgrom
Recipient, 2008 Erwin Plein Nemmers Prize in Economics

Paul R. Milgrom is the Shirley R. and Leonard W. Ely, Jr. Professor of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford University. The selection committee for the economics prize recognized Milgrom “for contributions dramatically expanding the understanding of the role of information and incentives in a variety of settings, including auctions, the theory of the firm, and oligopolistic markets.”

“Milgrom’s path-breaking work has developed and popularized new tools for the analysis of asymmetric information and strategic interaction and, most significantly, has shown the usefulness of those tools for the analysis of applied problems,” said Charles Manski, professor and chair of economics at Northwestern.

Milgrom’s work on auctions helped lay the groundwork for one of the most fruitful research areas in microeconomics over the last 30 years and has seen practical applications in radio spectrum auctions worldwide.  His work on the theory of the firm has been equally influential.  Milgrom has also made important contributions to the study of how asymmetric information can affect firm behavior in oligopolistic markets.

Milgrom received his B.A. from the University of Michigan and Ph.D. from Stanford University.  He has served on the faculty at Northwestern as well as Yale University.  Among his honors, Milgrom is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the National Academy of Sciences and holds an honorary doctorate from the Stockholm School of Economics.  He has twice been a Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, and has received a Guggenheim Fellowship.  He currently serves on the council of the Econometric Society, and has served previously as co-editor of the American Economic Review.

Click here for press release on Paul R. Milgrom's receipt of the award.

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Lars Peter Hansen
Recipient, 2006 Erwin Plein Nemmers Prize in Economics

Lars Peter Hansen is the Homer J. Livingston Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago. The selection committee for the economics prize recognized Hansen “for rigorously relating economic theory to observed macroeconomic and asset market behavior and for innovations in modeling optimal policy under uncertainty.”

Widely recognized as one of the most important empirical economists of our day, Hansen's "studies of macroeconomic and asset market behavior are notable for their methodological innovations, combining economic theory and frontier econometric methods,” said Robert Porter, professor and chair of economics at Northwestern. “He also has made important contributions in modeling optimal policy under uncertainty.”

In essence, Hansen has studied dynamic properties of financial markets and how they reflect the uncertainties of the macroeconomic environment by developing and applying rigorous statistical methods.

Among Hansen’s honors, he is the recipient of the Frisch Prize, awarded every other year for the best empirical paper in the journal “Econometrica.” He holds fellowships at the Econometric Society, American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences, and he was a fellow at the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

Hansen also is a former co-editor of “Econometrica” and of the “Journal of Political Economy.” He is the author or co-author of numerous articles and books including “Robust Control and Economic Model Uncertainty” with Thomas J. Sargent, which is in press.

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Ariel Rubinstein
Recipient, 2004 Erwin Plein Nemmers Prize in Economics

Ariel Rubinstein is professor of economics at Tel Aviv University, Israel, and New York University.

The Selection Committee for the economics prize recognized Rubinstein “for a broad series of highly original contributions to game theory in economics, ranging from analyses of bargaining and repeated games to models of bounded rationality.”

Rubinstein’s work on non-cooperative bargaining has been extraordinarily influential, with well over 700 citations. He was among the first to develop a compelling game theoretic model of non-cooperative bargaining with a unique solution to the bargaining problem.

Widely recognized as one of the most important and creative economic theorists of our day, he has worked on several of the most important problems in economic theory and led the development of literatures in several areas of research. Rubinstein’s seminal contributions to economics -- especially in bargaining, a basic economic activity -- have opened up new avenues of research and new ways of thinking.

Rubinstein began his academic career as an economics faculty member of The Hebrew University. He then joined the department of economics at Tel Aviv University where he serves as professor and holds the Salzberg Chair.

He is an overseas member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, fellow and current president of the Econometric Society, and fellow of the Israeli Academy of Sciences. He is a recipient of the Michael Bruno Memorial Award (2000) and the Pras Israel (2002). He has held editorial positions on such leading journals as Econometrica, the Journal of Economic Theory, the Review of Economic Studies, and Games and Economic Behavior.

Rubinstein delivered the Walras-Bowley Lecture at The Econometric Society meeting (1988); the Churchill Lecture (Cambridge University, 1996); the Zeuthen Lecture (Copenhagen, 1996); the Pareto Lecture (Alicante, 1996); the Schwartz Lecture (Northwestern University, 1998); the Schumpeter Lecture (European Economic Association, Bolzano, 2000); and the Woodward Lecture (University of British Columbia, Vancouver, 2003).

Rubinstein received degrees in economics and mathematics — bachelor’s, master’s and a doctorate — from The Hebrew University.

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Edward C. Prescott
Recipient, 2002 Erwin Plein Nemmers Prize in Economics

Edward C. Prescott, Regents Professor at the University of Minnesota and senior economic advisor to the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, is widely regarded as one of the intellectual leaders of the rational expectations movement within modern macroeconomics. His work has greatly influenced the field of economics, as well as other areas of study, such as industrial organization, finance, general equilibrium theory and econometrics.

Prescott's work has focused on business cycles and economic fluctuations. He has demonstrated that standard growth behavior historically studied by microeconomists also can explain business cycle fluctuations that macroeconomists have sought to understand. His theory that a substantial part of business cycles are simply the best response of the economy to policy changes that affect the economy's productivity is widely accepted in the field of economics.

Prescott's work has also considered the importance of an organization's ability and willingness to commit to specific policies over the long term. Prescott argues that people put their trust in organizations-including government and corporations-because they believe those organizations will deliver on their commitments. Failure to follow through on commitments would make people unwilling to invest in those organizations in the future. This line of reasoning has been considered crucial in the development of central banks that can act independently and maintain credibility in the marketplace.

Prescott received his bachelor's degree in mathematics from Swarthmore College in 1962, his master's degree in operations research from Case-Western University in 1963, and his Ph.D. in economics from Carnegie-Mellon University in 1967.

He has held teaching positions at the University of Chicago, Carnegie-Mellon University, and the University of Pennsylvania. During 1979-82, he served on the faculties of Northwestern's Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences and Kellogg School of Management.

Prescott is a co-editor of Economic Theory and a research associate for the National Bureau of Economic Research. He is a former president of the Society of Economic Dynamics and Control and Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory and a former associate editor of the Journal of Economic Theory, International Economic Review and the Journal of Econometrics.

He has authored more than 70 principal articles, addressing topics like business cycles, economic development, general equilibrium theory, banking and finance and economic policy. He is a fellow of the Econometric Society and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Science.

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Daniel L. McFadden
Recipient, 2000 Erwin Plein Nemmers Prize in Economics

Daniel L. McFadden is the E. Morris Cox Professor of Economics at the University of California-Berkeley.

McFadden has made pioneering contributions in econometrics and has been highly influential in theoretical and applied economics. His 1973 article "Conditional Logit Analysis of Qualitative Choice Behavior" is recognized as one of the most important milestones in the development of microeconometrics, the field that deals with the analysis of economic data using models of consumer and firm behavior. Through this and many subsequent articles and books, McFadden founded modern econometric research on the analysis of discrete choice. The models and methods that he developed have become standard tools used to interpret the decisions made by consumers, firms and governments in a wide variety of contexts.

Among his other major methodological innovations, McFadden has proposed novel estimation methods that use simulation techniques to approximate the values of functions that are otherwise too difficult to calculate. Early in his career, he performed important research on the theoretical and econometric analysis of production decisions by firms. McFadden has, throughout his career, complemented his methodological research with important contributions to many fields of applied economics. He is widely respected for his research on travel demand forecasting, consumer utilization of energy-consuming appliances, the economics of aging, and the use of contingent valuation methods to value public goods.

McFadden has held permanent faculty positions at the University of Pittsburgh, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of California at Berkeley. He currently is director of the Econometrics Laboratory at Berkeley.

He is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences. He has been awarded the John Bates Clark Medal of the American Economics Association and the Frisch Medal of the Econometric Society. McFadden served as president of the Econometric Society in 1985.

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Robert J. Aumann
Recipient, 1998 Erwin Plein Nemmers Prize in Economics

Robert J. Aumann is a mathematical economist and professor of mathematics and economics at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Aumann has taught at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem since 1956. He has been one of the leaders in revolutionizing economics and other social sciences by expanding their analysis to issues of strategies, coalitions and information. His contributions include substantial discoveries about large competitive markets and games with a continuum of players, the development of the general model of coalitional games, the first studies of dynamic strategic interaction with differential information, founding the subject of interactive epistemology and establishing the logical foundation of rational correlated behavior.

Aumann received his bachelor of science degree from the City College of New York, and master's and doctoral degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is a fellow or member of he American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the US National Academy of Sciences, the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, and the British Academy, and is a past president of the Israel Mathematics Union. He is a recipient of the Harvey Prize in Science and Technology from the Technion (Israel Institute of Technology) and of the Israel Prize in Economics.

The author of four books and dozens of scientific publications, Aumann is responsible for founding and editing leading scientific publications and organizing some of the earliest conferences in game theory and economics.

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Thomas J. Sargent
Recipient, 1996 Erwin Plein Nemmers Prize in Economics

Thomas J. Sargent is David Rockefeller Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.

Sargent is internationally known for his work in both empirical and theoretical macroeconomics. He did pioneering research analyzing how consumers and firms form expectations about future government policies. His work has been instrumental in developing empirical versions of the theory of rational expectations.

The relationship between private market expectations and the effects of government policy was one of the crucial missing links in Keynesian models. Sargent applied the theory of rational expectations to study the causes and cures of hyperinflations, the correlation between unemployment and inflations, the term structure of interest rates and the interaction between monetary and fiscal policies. He has also made important contributions to monetary theory.

A member of the University of Chicago faculty since 1991 and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution since 1987, Sargent was a professor at the University of Minnesota for sixteen years. He has served as a research associate since 1979 at the National Bureau of Economic Research and as an advisor since 1971 to the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis.

Sargent received his bachelor's degree from the University of California at Berkeley and his Ph.D. from Harvard University. He is author of two leading textbooks in graduate macroeconomics.

Sargent was elected a fellow of both the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1983. His numerous books on economic theory include Rational Expectations and Inflation, published in 1992, and Bounded Rationality in Macroeconomics, published in 1993. Elected a fellow of the Econometric Society in 1976, Sargent has served as president of the Society for Economic Dynamics and Control.

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Peter A. Diamond
Recipient, 1994 Erwin Plein Nemmers Prize in Economics

Peter A. Diamond is the Paul A. Samuelson Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Diamond's first pathbreaking article, written in 1965, showed how to analyze the effects of the public debt on the behavior of the economy in the long run, and it has formed the basis for much of what has been written in the past decade about the growth of the U.S. public debt. His second article revolutionized the study of sales and property taxes, showing governments how they could raise the required amount of revenue while minimizing the harmful effects of the taxes on the functioning of the economy. His third article opened up a whole new way of thinking about prosperity and recession, emphasizing how the actions of each producer "spill over" and enlarge (or shrink) the market for other goods.

Diamond also has participated actively in policy discussions and debate, especially in the areas of social security and health policy, where individual choice and social insurance come together.

Diamond was a founding member of the National Academy of Social Insurance in 1988 and he was elected to membership in the National Academy of Sciences in 1984. He was elected as a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1978 and a fellow of the Econometric Society in 1968.

He was also a recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship in 1966 and in 1982-83. The author of numerous articles, Diamond is also co-editor of the Journal of Public Economics.

A member of the MIT faculty since 1966, Diamond has been a visiting professor at the European University Institute; Harvard University; Balliol College at Oxford; Nuffield College at Oxford; Hebrew University, Jerusalem; University College, Nairobi; and Churchill College at Cambridge. He has also been a member of the faculty at the University of California, Berkeley.

Diamond received a Ph.D. in economics from MIT in 1963.

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