Harvard Economist Susan Athey Wins a Top Award (1/2)

Susan Athey, an economics professor at Harvard University, has won the John Bates Clark Medal. The American Economics Association awards the Clark Medal to the most promising economists. And it may be even harder to win than a Nobel Prize in economics. The Clark Medal is given every two years. And the winner has to be under the age of forty.

Susan Athey is 36 years old and the first woman to win the Clark Medal in its 60 year history. No woman has yet won the Nobel economics prize which has been awarded since 1969.

Professor Athey came to Harvard in Massachusetts last year. Before that she was at Stanford University in California for 5 years. And before that she taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for 6 years.

Past winners received the Clark Medal for a single area of research. But Susan Athey was honored for her work across several areas of economics. Her work has dealt with both applied theory and empirical studies. In other words, it has dealt both with the complex methods that help economists do their jobs and with economic problems in the real world.