U of C economist wins $150K prize from Northwestern
(Crain’s) — A University of Chicago economist has been awarded a $150,000 prize from Northwestern University for his work on economic theory and studies of how financial markets reflect macroeconomic uncertainties.
Lars Peter Hansen won the Erwin Plein Nemmers Prize in Economics, which was established in 1994 through bequests from a former professor at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management and his brother, a Milwaukee church music publisher.
Mr. Hansen was recognized by the award selection committee “for rigorously relating economic theory to observed macroeconomic and asset market behavior and for innovations in modeling optimal policy under uncertainty,” Northwestern said.
A companion award in mathematics, the Frederic Esser Nemmers Prize, was given to Robert P. Langlands, a mathematics professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., for his “fundamental vision connecting representation theory, automorphic forms and number theory.”
Use of the $150,000 prize is unrestricted. Three of the six past Nemmers economics prize winners have gone on to win the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science, Northwestern said.
Professors at Northwestern are not eligible for either prize.
