Top economists at ASU recognized for lifelong contributions

A Nobel Prize winner and three other top economists at the W. P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University are being recognized as elected fellows of the prestigious international Econometric Society for their lifelong contributions to the field of economics. One of them was just elected to this organization comprised of representatives from the most elite universities in the world, including Harvard University, Princeton University and the University of Oxford.

Nobel Laureate Edward Prescott is the W. P. Carey Chair in Economics, a Guggenheim Fellow, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a senior adviser to the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. He has been a fellow of the Econometric Society for about 30 years and values its importance.

“The Econometric Society was formed to make economics a quantitative science – that is, a hard science,” Prescott said. “The society has been successful in this regard.”

Michael Keane, a professor in the Carey School, also has been a fellow of the society for several years and was just chosen as a council member of the group. He is an ASU Research Fellow, who recently received a major international award for his work on how insurance markets work. The Ken Arrow Award is named for a Nobel Laureate, who also is a fellow of the Econometric Society.

Professor Richard Rogerson, whose research is currently supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation, and Professor Lin Zhou, who has a doctorate from Princeton, also are Econometric Society fellows from the W. P. Carey School of Business. This is Zhou’s first year in the organization.

While tens of thousands of economists work around the world, less than 650 are elected as fellows of the Econometric Society. Just 21 new fellows were chosen to join for the current year, including Zhou and representatives from Stanford, Yale, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and top international schools.

Robert Mittelstaedt, dean of the W. P. Carey School of Business, said having four fellows in this eminent group is further evidence the school is increasingly becoming a destination where top economists choose to work and thrive.

“Because of the current global situation, economic research and understanding have never been more important,”  Mittelstaedt said. “The W. P. Carey School of Business has been named top 25 for business school research productivity, and our full-time MBA program is ranked top 30 in the nation. We have succeeded in creating an environment that supports faculty in conducting world-class research, and the Econometric Society selections certainly reinforce that.”