全世界女性经济学家的骄傲:susan athey
2007-06-29 04:02阅读：
全世界女性经济学家的骄傲:Susan
Athey
Susan Athey 在哈佛的个人主页:
http://kuznets.fas.harvard.edu/~athey/
Welcome to the Harvard Economics
Department
Professor Susan Athey Wins the 2007 John Bates Clark
Medal
(April 20, 2007) Professor Susan Athey of the Economics Department
is the 2007 recipient of the John Bates Clark Medal. The John Bates
Clark Medal is awarded every other year by the American Economics
Association to “ that American economist under the age of forty who
is adjudged to have made a significant contribution to economic
thought and knowledge .” The award recognizes Professor Athey for
her fundamental contributions to a remarkably wide set of topics,
ranging from economic theory to empirical economics to
econometrics. Her research is described
in more detail on the
AEA John Bates
Clark Web site
Susan Athey
Susan Athey is an applied theorist who has made important
contributions to economic theory, empirical economics, and
econometrics. She has built a research program strongly focused on
using theory to understand substantive economic issues, especially
in industrial organization. She has developed tools and techniques
that provide the basis for empirical work strongly grounded in
sound economic theory. She has made particularly important advances
in developing and applying tools that replace strong functional
form assumptions in models with more plausible conditions such as
monotonicity, thereby facilitating the development of more robust
empirical results.
Monotone Informational Models
A great deal of economic theory is agnostic about functional form.
For empirical work, however, functional form is crucial, but strong
assumptions such as linearity are implausible and in many cases
theoretically impossible. Weaker assumptions such as monotonicity
are often quite plausible in applied settings. Athey has played a
major role in rewriting economic theory to exploit monotonicity
assumptions. Her 2002
Quarterly Journal of Economics and
her 2001
Econometrica papers are fundamental steps toward
that goal. The first paper demonstrates how a monotonicity
assumption can be used to derive “expected” comparative statics
results in a model with informational imperfections. The second
paper uses a monotonicity-like condition, the single crossing
property, to derive strong results about equilibrium –– in this
case the existence of a pure strategy equilibrium. The powerful
techniques developed in these papers have been profitably used in
applied problems by Athey and others.
Industrial Organization: Auctions
Athey has also made important contributions to the economic
analysis of auctions. Her 2001
Journal of Political
Economy paper with Levin examines the role of private
information in timber auctions. Most work on auctions makes an
assumption about whether there is private information, and whether
this information is private value or common value, and proceeds
from those assumptions. Through the use of innovative theory and by
carefully analyzing the structure of bids, Athey and Levin are able
to identify private information. This work draws on Athey’s earlier
work on monotone existence and demonstrates the power of that work.
It also develops techniques that are likely to be valuable in a
variety of economic problems.
Macroeconomics
In joint work with Kyle Bagwell and Chris Sanchirico (
Review of
Economic Studies 2004), Athey examined a setting in which a
set of firms repeatedly interact. Broadly speaking, she shows that
the optimal collusive equilibrium requires no price wars on the
equilibrium path and rigid prices. With Andrew Atkeson and Patrick
Kehoe (
Econometrica 2005), she uses a similar insight to
provide conditions under which optimal monetary policy is static
and does not depend on shock reports that the government has made
in previous periods. The basic trade-off in monetary policy design
is well-understood: allowing discretion leads to the temptation to
inflate in the short-run. Absence of discretion means the inability
to respond to information that is private to the central bank. The
solution is a legislated inflation cap to limit discretion. The
greater the problem of time-inconsistency, the tighter the
constraint has to be.
Econometrics
Athey has made significant econometric contributions to
nonparametric structural analysis and to the estimation of
difference-in-differences models. Inference in the empirical
literature on auctions has typically rested on a mix of
nonparametric and parametric assumptions on bidder information and
behavior. The nonparametric assumptions are suppositions about
bidder information sets, preferences, and strategic behavior drawn
from the theory of auctions. In contrast, the parametric
assumptions are ad hoc functional form specifications made for
“convenience.” In joint work with Phil Haile (
Econometrica
2002), Athey strips away the parametric assumptions and examines
the identification and testability of various auction models using
only the nonparametric assumptions of auction theory. The paper
applies basic probabilistic properties of order statistics to show
how the inferential possibilities depend on the institutional
structure of the auction and on the data available on participants’
bids. This work is a valuable contribution to the growing body of
econometric research on nonparametric structural analysis.
The standard linear difference-in-differences model for analysis of
treatment response supposes that an intervention is applied to a
treatment group in the second of two time periods. The outcome of
interest is assumed to vary linearly with group membership, the
time period, and a group-time interaction. In joint work with Guido
Imbens (
Econometrica 2006), Athey addresses concern about
the credibility of these linearity assumptions by developing a
nonparametric
change-in-changes model. This replaces the
assumption of linearity with the assumption of monotonicity of
outcomes in a person-specific scalar unobserved variable and with
time-stationarity of the distribution of this variable within
groups. The paper is an important advance over the existing linear
differences in differences approach.
Home Page: http://kuznets.fas.harvard.edu/~athey/
CV:
http://kuznets.fas.harvard.edu/~athey/cv.html
Previous John Bates
Clark Medalists.
