The John Bates Clark Award, given to the best economist in the United States under 40, was given to Princeton’s Yuliy Sannikov today. The JBC has, in recent years, been tilted quite heavily toward applied empirical microeconomics, but the prize for Sannikov breaks that streak in striking fashion. Sannikov, it can be fairly said, is a mathematical genius and a high theorist of the first order. He is one of a very small number of people to win three gold medals at the International Math Olympiad – perhaps only Gabriel Carroll, another excellent young theorist, has an equally impressive mathematical background in his youth. Sannikov’s most famous work is in the pure theory of dynamic contracting, which I will spend most of this post discussing, but the methods he has developed turn out to have interesting uses in corporate finance and in macroeconomic models that wish to incorporate…
View original post 1,698 more words
Recent Comments