Last week, Dave Donaldson, an economic historian and trade economist, has won the 2017 John Bates Clark medal! This is an absolutely fantastic prize: it is hard to think of any young economist whose work is as serious as Donaldson’s. What I mean by that is that in nearly all of Donaldson’s papers, there is a very specific and important question, a deep collection of data, and a rigorous application of theory to help identify the precise parameters we are most concerned with. It is the modern economic method at its absolute best, and frankly is a style of research available to very few researchers, as the specific combination of theory knowledge and empirical agility required to employ this technique is very rare.
A canonical example of Donaldson’s method is his most famous paper, written back when he was a graduate student: “The Railroads of the Raj”. The…
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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