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Matthew Gentzkow named fourth recipient of the Calvó-Armengol International Prize in Economics
Photo: Chicago Booth
The Stanford professor will join Raj Chetty, Esther Duflo, and Roland Fryer on the prestigious list of rising academic stars who have received the Calvó Prize.
The Barcelona School of Economics, in cooperation with the Government of Andorra and the Credit Andorrà Foundation, is pleased to announce that the fourth Calvó-Armengol International Prize in Economics will be awarded to Matthew Gentzkow.
Matthew Gentzkow (PhD, Harvard University) is Professor of Economics at Stanford University. Prior to joining the faculty at Stanford, he was a professor at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. Professor Gentzkow has won several awards, including a Sloan Fellowship and the John Bates Clark Medal (a distinction awarded by the American Economic Association to the best American economist younger than 40 years). He is a Fellow of the Econometric Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has been a member of several editorial boards and is currently the co-editor of the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics.
Media influence on voters
Professor Gentzkow’s major contributions have been in the area of industrial organization. He studies the behavior and performance of markets with a special interest in the media industry. In his work, Prof. Gentzkow examines the extent to which newspapers offer a wide range of information to their readers, the source of media biases, and how these affect the decisions of voters. He pursues answers to these important questions through both theoretical models and data analysis to assess the behavior of the media.
“Gentzkow is a productive young economist who applies frontier methods in empirics and theory to an important set of questions. His skills span the full range of the discipline. He has been a pioneer in the area of media economics, defining questions appropriate to the changing media landscape. His work is creative without sacrificing quality. He has established himself as a role model in both substance and execution.”
American Economic Association Honors and Awards Committee,
on the award of the John Bates Clark Medal to Prof. Gentzkow (April 2014)
Much of Antoni Calvó-Armengol’s own work focused on the distribution, interpretation, and use of information in society. Professor Gentzkow’s research examines these issues in the context of the media industry, making him the ideal recipient of the prize named in Prof. Calvó-Armengol’s honor.
Professor Gentzkow will officially receive the fourth edition of the Calvó Prize in Spring 2016. Activities related to the Prize include an award ceremony in Andorra, homeland of Toni Calvó; an academic conference in Barcelona, where Prof. Calvó spent much of his research career; and an academic workshop for young investigators from around the world, directed by the Prize recipient. The Prize also includes a cash award of €30,000.
Prize background
The Calvó-Armengol International Prize memorializes Antoni Calvó-Armengol, who passed away in 2007 at 37 years of age. A native of Andorra, Toni was a professor at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and the BSE who made outstanding contributions in social economics.
The Calvó Prize is awarded every two years to an economist or other social scientist who is not older than 40 years old, for his or her contributions to the understanding of social structure and its implications for economic interactions.
Previous recipients of the Calvó Prize:
- 2014: Raj Chetty (Harvard)
- 2012: Roland Fryer (Harvard)
- 2010: Esther Duflo (MIT)
Prize selection committee:
- Salvador Barbera (UAB and BSE)
- Matthew O. Jackson (Stanford University, prize chair)
- Joel Sobel (UC San Diego)
Read more about Matthew Gentzkow’s award-winning research
- American Economic Association Honors and Awards Committee highlights some of Prof. Gentzkow’s most important contributions before winning the Clark Medal
- Interview with Prof. Gentzkow in The New York Times