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果冻影院 academic wins prestigious economics award
8 April 2019
Professor Imran Rasul (果冻影院 Economics) has received the Yrj枚 Jahnsson Award in Economics, in recognition of his pioneering work on personnel economics and development.
Professor Rasul, co-director of the Centre for the Microeconomic Analysis of Public Policy at the Institute for Fiscal Studies, was jointly awarded the prize with Professor听Oriana Bandiera (LSE, Department of Economics). Both are applied microeconomists.
The Award Selection Committee commended their work on the role of social relationships in economics, which they have 鈥渁dvanced through pioneering field experiments in the workplace and social networks.鈥�
On hearing the news, Professor Rasul said: 鈥淚t is a great honour to receive this award 鈥� it is the second time running faculty at 果冻影院 Economics have been awarded, and this reflects the fantastic set of colleagues and students that we have here.鈥�
The Yrj枚 Jahnsson Award in Economics, established in 1993, recognises and awards a European economist 听no older than 45 years old听who has made a significant contribution to economics in Europe through theoretical and applied research.听The European Economic Association (EEA) cooperates with the Yrj枚 Jahnsson Foundation in the selection of the award winners.听
The Committee acknowledged Professors Rasul and Bandiera鈥檚 seminal work, jointly with Associate Professor Iwan Barankay (University of Pennsylvania), on social preferences and the response to incentives.
In a series of field experiments aimed at estimating the causal effect of social relationships on incentives, they introduced a clever exogenous variation (independent variation) in the incentive structure offered to workers picking 鈥渟oft fruit鈥� in the UK.
They used this setting to explore a number of issues - such as social preferences, social incentives, the role of connections and the effect of inequality - that until then had been studied only theoretically or in laboratory setting.
Rasul and Bandiera have also provided other novel empirical evidence on the role of social networks for technology adoption in a farming context, on the effectiveness of anti-poverty programs, and on the functioning of labor markets in low-income settings.
The Committee added: 鈥淎n important contribution of their work is that their experiments have become a role model for randomized control trials for incentive treatments and they have deeply influenced the applied microeconomics field. Their transformative work has inspired a generation of applied economists.鈥�
The Award, which is now in its fourteenth year, will be presented to Professors Rasul and Bandiera during the annual EEA Congress, which will be held in Manchester during August 2019.
It is the second time running听that a 果冻影院 academic has been awarded the prestigious prize. Previous winners include Professor Ran Spiegler (果冻影院 Economics), for his important contributions to economic theory and bounded rationality, and Sir Richard Blundell (果冻影院 Economics), for his pioneering contributions to consumption behaviour and micro econometrics.