Ariél Pakes
For his "fundamental contributions to the development of the field of empirical industrial organization as it is applied to the study of market power, prices, mergers and productivity."
Ariel Pakes received the Erwin Plein Nemmers Prize in Economics, honored for his “fundamental contributions to the development of the field of empirical industrial organization as it is applied to the study of market power, prices, mergers and productivity.” He is the Thomas Professor of Economics at Harvard University.
In his research, Pakes develops methods for empirically analyzing market responses to environmental and policy changes. He and his collaborators have developed ways to estimate and analyze consumer demand patterns that underlie pricing and product placement incentives, the production functions that underlie the analysis of firm productivity and the investment decisions that underlie the evolution of markets over time.
Pakes and collaborators have demonstrated the usefulness of these tools by analyzing deregulation in the telecommunication industry, demand and product placement decisions in the auto industry, the impact of incentives on doctors’ hospital allocations and consumers’ choices of health insurance plans, the evolution of bidding strategies in a new electric utility market and the development of improved consumer price indices. Subsequently, these tools have become a mainstay of market interactions in much of economics and are often employed by consultancies and regulatory agencies to analyze the likely outcomes of regulatory decisions. They have also been used for internal firm planning.
Pakes is a member of the Econometric Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences. He has received the Frisch Medal of the Econometric Society, the Jean-Jacques Laffont Prize for research that integrates theory with empirical analysis and the BBVA Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Economics, Finance and Management. Pakes is a laureate of the Web of Science and an honoree of the American Antitrust Institute for Outstanding Antitrust Achievement in Economics. He also is a distinguished fellow of both the Industrial Organization Society and of the American Economic Association. Pakes is a founding member of Microeconomic Insights, a home for summaries of microeconomic research that informs the public about societally relevant microeconomic issues.
The 2022 Nemmers Prize Selection Committee was Jeffrey Ely (Northwestern), Richard Blundell (UCL) and Janet Currie (Princeton).