IZA NewsMay 13, 2019

IZA Young Labor Economist Award goes to Leah Boustan and Philipp Kircher

Outstanding research on different facets of labor economics

We are pleased to announce the 2019 IZA Young Labor Economist Award. This biennial prize is awarded to outstanding labor economists whose Ph.D. was received fewer than 15 years ago. The 2019 Award goes to Leah Platt Boustan (Princeton University) for her historical research on immigration, and to Philipp Kircher (University of Edinburgh and European University Institute) for his work on search, sorting and matching in labor markets.

“The Award thus typifies the tremendous breadth of what is classifiable as labor economics,” said Daniel Hamermesh, who chairs the IZA Prize Committee. This year’s committee choosing the Awardees further consisted of Oriana Bandiera (LSE), Richard Blundell (UCL), George Borjas (Harvard), Pierre Cahuc (Sciences Po), Chinhui Juhn (Houston) and Shelly Lundberg (UC-Santa Barbara).

The Award contains a small monetary prize, which will be conferred during the IZA Reception at the ASSA Meetings on January 3, 2020, in San Diego, California.

Leah Boustan

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Leah Platt Boustan is a Professor of Economics at Princeton University, where she is also a faculty associate of the Industrial Relations Section. Her research lies at the intersection between economic history and labor economics. Her recent work has been on the mass migration from Europe to the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She is co-director of the Development of the American Economy Program at the NBER. She also serves as co-editor at the Journal of Urban Economics and on the editorial board of the American Economic Review and the Journal of Economic Perspectives. She was named an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow in 2012 and was a Research Fellow at the Straus Institute at the NYU School of Law in 2013.

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Philipp Kircher

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Philipp Kircher is a Professor of Economics at the European University Institute and the University of Edinburgh. He received his PhD from the University of Bonn in 2006, and previously held positions at the University of Pennsylvania, Oxford and the London School of Economics. He has been managing editor and currently serves as chairman of the Review of Economic Studies. His research focuses on the consequences of search frictions in labor markets, in particular regarding wage setting and assignment of workers to jobs. His papers have been published in the American Economic Review, Econometrica, the Journal of Political Economy, the Review of Economic Studies, and the Quarterly Journal of Economics, among others. His research is currently supported by an ERC consolidator grant and has previous been funded by an ERC starting grant, by the ESRC, and by the NSF.

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