Photo provided by UC Berkeley.
Congratulations to Emi Nakamura, a visiting scholar in our Economic Research Department, for being named the best young American economist for 2019.
Nakamura, Chancellor’s Professor of Economics at UC Berkeley, was awarded the John Bates Clark Medal by the American Economic Association (AEA). The annual award recognizes American economists under age 40 who have made the most significant contributions to economic thought and knowledge. Among economists, the Clark Medal is generally as highly regarded as the Nobel Prize.
The award announcement noted, “Nakamura’s distinctive approach is notable for its creativity in suggesting new sources of data to address long-standing questions in macroeconomics.”
“Emi is a fantastic economist and the SF Fed is privileged to have her as a visiting scholar,” said research advisor Vasco Cúrdia. “She has done work on evaluating how different theories of price setting by firms compare with micro-data on prices. Her work is thorough, original and creative. Not satisfied with existing datasets, Emi and her co-authors have looked for other complementary, richer data sources and carefully analyzed them.”
Much of Emi’s research is co-authored with Jón Steinsson, also a visiting scholar at the SF Fed.
“I am a big fan of Emi’s work with her husband Jón,” said Òscar Jordà, vice president. “There are several of their papers that I have cited in my own work. Examples include their work on models that help us understand the rates of return of different asset classes, and in particular housing; new methods to isolate monetary experiments from observational data; and a wide-ranging investigation of the effects of monetary policy.”
In a conference here last November, Nakamura presented recent work with coauthors Masao Fukui and Jón Steinsson, “Women, Wealth Effects, and Slow Recoveries.” The paper shows that slower growth in women’s employment has caused slower overall job growth during the most recent recovery.
The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect the views of the management of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco or of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System.