The economics of awards, status and performance: the John Bates Clark Medal and the Fellowship of the Econometric Society

This thesis investigates whether receiving an important award in academia raises recipients’ subsequent research productivity and status compared to a synthetic control group of non-recipient scholars with similar previous research performance. It examines the case of being awarded the John Bates Clark Medal and becoming a Fellow of the Econometric Society finding evidence of positive incentive and status effects that raise both productivity and citation levels.

Academic honors and performance

Despite the social importance of awards, they have been largely disregarded by academic research in economics. This paper investigates whether receiving prestigious academic awards—the John Bates Clark Medal and the Fellowship of the Econometric Society—is associated with higher subsequent research productivity and status compared to a synthetic control group of non-recipient scholars with similar previous research performance. Our results suggest statistically significant positive publication and citation differences after award receipt.

External influence as an indicator of scholarly importance

Although the external influence of scholars has usually been approximated by publication and citation count, the array of scholarly activities is far more extensive. Today, new technologies, in particular Internet search engines, allow more accurate measurement of scholars' influence on societal discourse. Hence, in this article, we analyse the relation between the internal and external influence of 723 top economists using the number of pages indexed by Google and Bing as a measure of external influence. We not only identify a small association between these scholars’ internal and external influence but also a correlation between internal influence, as captured by receipt of such major academic awards as the Nobel Prize and John Bates Clark Medal, and the external prominence of the top 100 researchers (JEL Code: A11, A13, Z18).

Reseña bibliográfica : poor economics. A radical rethinking of the way to fight global poverty

El libro recientemente publicado Poor Economics -y la técnica de evaluaciones aleatorias que dan sustento a sus conclusionestienen el potencial para cambiar radicalmente la manera de diseñar políticas para combatir la pobreza en el mundo. El libro fue escrito por Abhijit Banerjee y Esther Duflo, dos jóvenes reconocidos economistas del MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology). Duflo, nacida en Francia y educada en el École Normale Supérieure de Paris y MIT, fue ganadora en 2010 del premio John Bates Clark al mejor economista menor de 40 años y considerada por la revista Foreign Policy como una de los 100 intelectuales más influyentes del mundo. Abhijit Banerjee educado en la Universidad de Calcuta (su ciudad de origen) y la Universidad de Harvard también es ganador de numerosos premios.

The distribution of wealth; a theory of wages, interest and profit,

Mode of access: Internet.

The distribution of wealth : a theory of wages, interest and profit /

Mode of access: Internet.

Postural control in children: Coupling to dynamic somatosensory information

The purpose of this investigation was to determine whether the coupling between dynamic somatosensory information and body sway is similar in children and adults. Thirty children (4-, 6-, and 8-year-olds) and 10 adults stood upright, with feet parallel, and lightly contacting the fingertip to a rigid metal plate that moved rhythmically at 0.2, 0.5, and 0.8 Hz. Light touch to the moving contact surface induced postural sway in all participants. The somatosensory stimulus produced a broadband frequency response in children, while the adult response was primarily at the driving frequency. Gain, as a function of frequency, was qualitatively the same in children and adults. Phase decreased less in 4-year-olds than other age groups, suggesting a weaker coupling to position information in the sensory stimulus. Postural sway variability was larger in children than adults. These findings suggest that, even as young as age 6, children show well-developed coupling to the sensory stimulus. However, unlike adults, this coupling is not well focused at the frequency specified by the somatosensory signal. Children may be unable to uncouple from sensory information that is less relevant to the task, resulting in a broadband response in their frequency spectrum. Moreover, higher sway variability may not result from the sensory feedback process, but rather from the children's underdeveloped ability to estimate an internal model of body orientation.