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The 2014 John Bates Clark Medal of the American Economic Association was awarded to Matthew Gentzkow of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. The citation recognized Matt's “fundamental contributions to our understanding of the economic forces driving the creation of media products, the changing nature and role of media in the digital environment, and the effect of media on education and civic engagement.” In addition to his work on the media, Matt has made a number of significant contributions to empirical industrial organization more broadly, as well as to applied economic theory. In this essay, I highlight some of these contributions.

The Lewis (1954) model of economic development is one of the rare 60 year-old papers still featured on many graduate economics reading lists. However, like many classics, the original paper, “Economic Development with Unlimited Supplies of Labor,” is probably read less frequently than it is cited. There are numerous commentaries and glosses available that save readers the trouble of wrestling with the original—even though Lewis’s writing was lucid and engaging. In particular, many development textbooks offer verbal or graphic summaries of the Lewis model, but the summaries often lose the richness of the original. Lewis’s (1954) paper bundles together theories of growth, structural transformation, inequality and distribution, wage determination, and population. The proliferation of ideas in the Lewis paper was not an accident. Lewis (p. 139) telegraphed his intention in the first paragraph of the paper, where he wrote: “This essay is written in the classical tradition, making the classical assumption, and asking the classical question. The classics, from Smith to Marx, all assumed, or argued, that an unlimited supply of labour was available at subsistence wages. They then inquired how production grows through time. They found the answer in capital accumulation, which they explained in terms of their analysis of the distribution of income. Classical systems thus determined simultaneously income distribution and income growth, with the relative prices of commodities as a minor by-product.” This paper was not a modest undertaking, and Lewis himself clearly viewed it as a major contribution.

Raj Chetty is eminently deserving of being awarded the John Bates Clark Medal at the age of 33. His research has transformed the field of public economics. His work is motivated by important public policy issues in the fields of taxation, social insurance, and public spending for education. He approaches his subjects with a creative redefinition of the problems that he studies, and his empirical methods often draw on experimental evidence or unprecedentedly large sets of integrated data. While his work is founded on basic microeconomics, he modifies this framework to take into account behavioral and institutional considerations. Chetty is a prolific scholar. It is difficult to summarize all of Chetty's research or even to capture the details of his most significant papers. I have therefore chosen a selection of Chetty's important papers dealing with taxation, social insurance, and education that contributed to his selection as the winner of the John Bates Clark Medal.

John Maynard Keynes made a major contribution to the development of professional investment management. Based on detailed archival research at King's College, Cambridge, we describe Keynes' investment philosophy, his investment performance, and the evolution of his investment approach as the manager of a large educational endowment. His portfolios were actively managed and unconventional. He was an investment innovator both in making a substantial allocation to the then new institutional asset class of common stocks as well as in championing value investing.

Martin Feldstein interviewed Paul Volcker in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on July 10, 2013, as part of a conference at the National Bureau of Economic Research on “The First 100 Years of the Federal Reserve: The Policy Record, Lessons Learned, and Prospects for the Future.” Volcker was Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System from 1979 through 1987. Before that, he served stints as President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York from 1975 to 1979, as Deputy Undersecretary for International Affairs in the US Department of the Treasury from 1969 to 1974, as Deputy Undersecretary for Monetary Affairs in the Treasury from 1963 to 1965, and as an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York from 1952 to 1957. He has led and served on a wide array of commissions, including chairing the President's Economic Recovery Advisory Board from its inception in 2009 through 2011.

Jonathan Levin, the 2011 recipient of the American Economic Association's John Bates Clark Medal, has established himself as a leader in the fields of industrial organization and microeconomic theory. Jon has made important contributions in many areas: the economics of contracts and organizations; market design; markets with asymmetric information; and estimation methods for dynamic games. Jon's combination of breadth and depth is remarkable, ranging from important papers in very distinct areas such as economic theory and econometric methods to applied work that seamlessly integrates theory with data. In what follows, we will attempt to do justice not only to Jon's academic work, but also try to sketch a broader portrait of Jon's other contributions to economics as a gifted teacher, dedicated advisor, and selfless provider of public goods.

Amy Finkelstein is the 2012 recipient of the John Bates Clark Medal from the American Economic Association. The core concerns of Amy's research program have been insurance markets and health care. She has addressed whether asymmetric information leads to inefficiencies in insurance markets, how large social insurance programs affect healthcare markets, and the determinants of innovation incentives in health care. We describe a number of Amy's key research contributions, with particular emphasis on those identified by the Honors and Awards Committee of the American Economic Association in her Clark Medal citation, as well as her broader contributions to the field of economics.

At the 1927 meetings of the American Economic Association, Paul Douglas presented a paper entitled “A Theory of Production,” which he had coauthored with Charles Cobb. The paper proposed the now familiar Cobb–Douglas function as a mathematical representation of the relationship between capital, labor, and output. The paper's innovation, however, was not the function itself, which had originally been proposed by Knut Wicksell, but the use of the function as the basis of a statistical procedure for estimating the relationship between inputs and output. The paper's least squares regression of the log of the output-to-capital ratio in manufacturing on the log of the labor-to-capital ratio—the first Cobb–Douglas regression—was a realization of Douglas's innovative vision that a stable relationship between empirical measures of inputs and outputs could be discovered through statistical analysis, and that this stable relationship could cast light on important questions of economic theory and policy. This essay provides an account of the introduction of the Cobb–Douglas regression: its roots in Douglas's own work and in trends in economics in the 1920s, its initial application to time series data in the 1927 paper and Douglas's 1934 book The Theory of Wages, and the early reactions of economists to this new empirical tool.

In a 1966 article in the American Economic Review, Harvey Leibenstein introduced the concept of “X-efficiency”: the gap between ideal allocative efficiency and actually existing efficiency. Leibenstein insisted that absent strong competitive pressure, firms are unlikely to use their resources efficiently, and he suggested that X-efficiency is pervasive. Leibenstein, of course, was attacking a fundamental economic assumption: that firms minimize costs. The X-efficiency article created a firestorm of criticism. At the forefront of Leibenstein's powerful critics was George Stigler, who was very protective of classical price theory. In terms of rhetorical success, Stigler's combination of brilliance and bluster mostly carried the day. While Leibenstein's response to Stigler was well reasoned, it never resonated with many economists, and Leibenstein remains undeservedly underappreciated. Leibenstein's challenge is as relevant today as it ever was.

David Hume (1711–1776) is arguably the most esteemed philosopher to have written in the English language. During his lifetime, however, Hume was as well if not better known for his contributions to political economy, particularly for the essays published as the Political Discourses (1752). Hume left his mark on the economic thought of the physiocrats, the classical economists, and the American Federalists. Adam Smith, who met Hume circa 1750, was his closest friend and interlocutor for some 25 years. Among modern economists, Hume's essays on money and trade have informed theorists of both Keynesian and Monetarist persuasions. In this essay, we begin by discussing Hume's monetary economics, and then spell out his theory of economic development, noting his qualified enthusiasm for the modern commercial system. We end with an assessment of his views on the scientific standing of economics, specifically his counterintuitive argument that economics could be epistemologically superior to physics.

Half a century ago, Economica published what its webpage claims is “the most heavily cited macroeconomics title of the 20th century”—the paper by A. W. H. “Bill” Phillips (1958) that introduced the Phillips curve. Based on admittedly circumstantial evidence, I will argue that Bill Phillips was not satisfied with the paper and had not intended to publish it in 1958. I believe that Phillips was persuaded to allow his paper to be published in 1958 by James Meade. After a brief overview of Phillips' early life and career, I attempt to show why Phillips was probably unhappy with the paper that introduced the curve that came to be identified with his name and how, nevertheless, it came to be published.

The theorem proving the existence of general equilibrium in a competitive economy, which necessarily involved specifying the conditions under which such an equilibrium would exist, is an extraordinary achievement of twentieth-century economics. The discovery is commonly attributed to a paper by (eventual) Nobel Prize winners Kenneth Arrow and Gerard Debreau: “Existence of an Equilibrium for a Competitive Economy,” published in the July 1954 issue of Econometrica. However it is less well-known that Lionel McKenzie published a paper in the previous issue of Econometrica, “On Equilibrium in Graham's Model of World Trade and Other Competitive Systems,” that discussed many of the same themes. Both papers established the existence of a competitive equilibrium for suitable general equilibrium models and employed fixed point theorem arguments. McKenzie had priority in publication in 1954 and received credit for simultaneous discovery in prominent sources around that time. But over the years, McKenzie's role in creating the proof of the existence of a general equilibrium seems to have faded from the collective consciousness of the economics profession. Newly available archival material permits a reexamination of the events surrounding the publication of both Econometrica papers in 1954. The story raises general issues concerning “simultaneous discovery,” “priority,” and “credit” in economic research and opens a window into some academic practices of that time.

Esther Duflo, winner of the 2010 John Bates Clark Medal, has made extraordinary contributions to development economics. She exemplifies and has played a vital role in the renaissance of development economics over the past decade. She has erected and inspired a research apparatus all over the developing world that integrates large-scale field experiments with economic theory to yield important insights for development policy and our understanding of behavior and institutions in developing countries. I'll divide my discussion of Esther's work into four categories: educational production, the economic lives of the poor, women as decisionmakers, and a broad category of market and policy failures. I will then offer some thoughts on Esther's role as a scholar–activist.

Emmanuel Saez, winner of the 2009 John Bates Clark Medal, has distinguished himself by making fundamental contributions concerning critical theoretical and empirical issues within the field of public economics. He is one of those exceptional scholars whose work reflects a broad and thoroughly integrated vision. In carefully and creatively implementing that vision, he has led a remarkable resurgence of interest in tax policy research over the last decade. Emmanuel's work can be divided into five areas: the theory of optimal taxes and transfers; the measurement of income and wealth distributions; the measurement of behavioral responses to personal taxation; the taxation of corporate dividends; and retirement saving. A great deal of his work is closely interrelated across these topics, which makes the whole considerably greater than the sum of the parts. In effect, he has bridged the chasm between theory and practical policymaking by attacking the policy design problem from both sides at once. This article provides a survey of Emmanuel's work.

Early modern Europe in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries witnessed an unprecedented increase in the rate of economic growth, and governments entertained a wide range of proposals aimed at developing and harnessing foreign trade and emerging financial markets. In his magisterial survey of foreign trade doctrine titled Studies in the Theory of International Trade (1936), Jacob Viner pointed out that enlightened authors of that time were often nonbullionist mercantilists: they favored export promotion and import reduction not on the grounds that it would lead to an accumulation of gold, but on the grounds that it would increase trade and employment. My focus here is on how some key economists of this time period—William Petty, John Law, and Richard Cantillon—adumbrated disputes between supply-side and demand-side macroeconomics that have continued to the present day.

The papers from the first year of the American Economic Review are included in the Archives of the American Economic Association. While researching the early years of the AEA, Ann Mari May came across a folder marked "Controversies, Criticisms, etc."-which stood out in the midst of a review of AEA minutes and reports. This folder included a bulky file on what AER Editor Davis Rich Dewey would come to refer to as the "Cross/Eaves Controversy"-a controversy that, according to a letter he wrote, would give him "no end of trouble." The trouble erupted with a book review that appeared in the first issue of the American Economic Review. The review, written by Ira Cross, addressed a book by Lucile Eaves entitled A History of California Labor Legislation. The controversy that ensued illustrates the eternally fascinating interaction of the reviewer and the reviewed and casts a revealing light on the era's standards and rituals of scholarly conduct, on the drawing of disciplinary boundaries as economics became a more distinct academic discipline, and on the differing treatment of men and women in the academic life of the time.

One frequently quoted passage from the work of John Maynard Keynes is that “the best way to destroy the capitalist system [is] to debauch the currency.” The passage, attributed to Vladimir Illyich Lenin, appears in Keynes' book The Economic Consequences of the Peace, which became an international bestseller when it was published in 1919. Economic historian Frank W. Fetter and others have expressed doubt that Keynes was really quoting Lenin because they found no such statement in Lenin's collected published writings. Fetter suggested that Keynes based his remark on stories about what the Soviets were supposed to be saying that he heard at the Paris peace conference of 1919. It is now possible to show that Keynes based his remark on a report of an interview with Lenin published by London and New York newspapers in April 1919. Keynes' discussion of inflation in the Economic Consequences can then be read as an extended commentary on the remarks attributed to Lenin in the interview. While the report of the interview was not reprinted after 1919, it will be also shown here that Lenin responded to Keynes in a speech that was reprinted in his Collected Works.

Susan Carleton Athey is the 2007 recipient of the American Economic Association's John Bates Clark Medal, which is “awarded biennially to that American economist under the age of forty who is adjudged to have made the most significant contribution to economic thought and knowledge.” I have had the immense pleasure of being Susan's teacher, her advisor, her coauthor, and her friend. Yet I never cease to be amazed at her abilities and her accomplishments on so many dimensions. The AEA specifically cited her work in four distinct areas: monotone information models; industrial organization and particularly auctions; macroeconomics; and econometrics. Yet there is even more breadth to Susan's research contributions than this suggests, as I will show.

Andrei Shleifer is the 1999 recipient of the John Bates Clark Medal, an award presented by the American Economic Association to an outstanding economist under the age of 40. The Clark medal citation singles out his contributions to three fields: corporate finance (corporate governance, law and finance), the economics of financial markets (deviations from efficient markets), and the economics of transition. One could add a fourth area, an early but then spurned love, macroeconomics (the role of increasing returns in cycles and growth). In each area that Andrei has touched, his contributions have shaped the basic paradigm and have triggered considerable follow-up research. The reason is that Andrei focuses on the big issues of economics. A recurring theme of his research is the respective role of markets, institutions, and governments. In his work, markets do not work perfectly and institutions are of the essence. But one should not trust governments always to do the right thing, be it in the design of institutions or in direct interventions. Governments are not perfect and sometimes they can be quite bad indeed. In the hands of others, such themes could lead to ideological blabber or to banal generalities. In Andrei’s hands, they don’t. In each case, Andrei focuses on a specific market, a specific institution, a specific mechanism. He writes down a simple model, very much in the old Chicago tradition, and uses it as a guide to the empirical evidence. He looks at the available evidence, often, as in his work on law and finance, assembling that evidence for the first time. The general lessons come from the accumulation of papers and evidence. This is why his work is so convincing, influential, and likely to endure.

KRUEGER: Let me begin by asking you where you were born. BAUMOL: I was born in New York, in South Bronx, in what later became Fort Apache and in fact spent several years of my life there later. KRUEGER: Did you go to public schools in New York? BAUMOL: Yes, I did. All the way through high school, and then went to the College of the City of New York afterwards. So I was in the public school system all the way through. Incidentally, I went to the same high school and college as Colin Powell. KRUEGER: Oh, is that right? BAUMOL: And told him that once, to which he responded, “Well, I’ll be damned.” KRUEGER: When you were at City College from 1938 to 1942, did you study economics? BAUMOL: Yes. I had been interested in economics actually since high school. I majored in two subjects: economics and art. We had a very mediocre economics department. Many of the other departments, such as philosophy, were excellent. So

Alan Krueger and Timothy Taylor interviewed Zvi Griliches, Paul M. Warburg Professor of Economics at Harvard University, at his home near the Harvard campus on June 21, 1999. The interview touches on his harrowing journey from Lithuania to Chicago; years at the University of Chicago; the move to Harvard University; work on diffusion and technology and on returns to education; thoughts on the data infrastructure; government service and economic research; and hobbies.

Kevin M. Murphy is the winner of the 1998 John Bates Clark Medal, presented by the American Economic Association every second year to an outstanding economist under the age of forty who is selected for special recognition. He is the George Pratt Schultz Professor of Business Economics and Industrial Relations in the University of Chicago's Graduate School of Business and is the model of an applied economist. I will survey a selection of his papers, highlighting his accomplisments in three principle areas--income inequality, unemployment, and economic growth--and considering a representative smattering of other topics.

The Nobel Prize was given to Robert C. Merton and Myron S. Scholes for discovering a new method for determining the value of an option. This is known as the Black-Merton-Scholes option pricing formula. The purpose of this essay is to explain why the Black-Merton-Scholes option pricing formula is so important to the finance profession, the economics profession, the financial industry, and society at large. This is done by studying the history of the formula's development, the economic logic underlying the formula's derivation, and the formula's ramifications for the various professions.

This paper surveys the contributions of Nobel laureates James Mirrlees and William Vickrey to the study of asymmetric information in economics, particularly as they relate to problems in public economics. It discusses and interprets Mirrlees's work on optimal income taxation and relates it to previous work on optimal distribution of income, including that of Vickrey. It also describes Vickrey's fundamental contribution to auction theory and its importance for the more general field of preference revelation. It also includes an evaluation of the prize winners' work in other areas of public economics, particularly on optimal indirect taxation and marginal cost pricing.

What is perhaps most curious about ‘Say's law’ is the continuing disagreement on its substance and to whom it should be credited. John Maynard Keynes summarized the law as ‘supply creates its own demand’ but it is now generally agreed that Keynes did not get it quite right. The author has been unable to ascertain who coined the term ‘Say's law’ but it appears to be a twentieth century appellation, preceding Keynes's use. John-Baptiste Say was certainly among the earlier writers to discuss the topic at length but so far as the author can determine, none of Say's contemporaries--including Say himself--credits him with having been first to enunciate its principles.

The purpose of this essay is to celebrate the contributions of John C. Harsanyi, John F. Nash, and Reinhard Selten to economics. The emphasis is on tracing the influence of their work on economic analysis rather than giving a detailed account of each of their contributions. The three researchers are identified with the three most important ideas in game theory: equilibrium, asymmetric information, and credibility. These three ideas have dominated not only theoretical research but also numerous other fields within economics since the 1950s.

The economics of Leon H. Keyserling influenced the Roosevelt era in terms of housing, agriculture, labor, and antitrust legislation. During the Truman era, discussed herein, Keyserling was influential as chair of the Council of Economic Advisors, stressing long-term growth, general and selective fiscal, monetary, and interest rate policies, and the view that economic growth, equity, and welfare are tied together via a full employment goal. Thus he was a liberal Keynesian and a pragmatist realizing that the keys to prosperity were consumption (wages) and investment (profits).

This paper examines Alfred Marshall's invention of the representative firm. Marshall first used the representative firm in order to describe an industry supply curve for an industry with heterogeneous firms. Despite Marshall's limited use of the notion, the representative agent was extensively criticized as an ephemeral, useless construct that was unable to account for economic growth and that ignored important heterogeneities. The criticisms succeeded in banishing the representative agent from economics. These initial criticisms are also shown to apply to modern uses of the representative agent as well.

One of the most interesting debates in modern economics centers around the question of whether integrating economies necessarily converge in terms of per capita income and technology. This debate is often believed to have been started by Thorstein Veblen in 1915. However, this paper demonstrates that the genesis of the convergence question goes back to the Scottish Enlightenment and the publication of an essay by David Hume in 1742. The ensuing ‘rich country-poor country’ debate--between David Hume on the convergence side and Josiah Tucker on the nonconvergence side--represents one of the first major doctrinal debates in economics.

L awrence Henry Summers is the 1993 recipient of the John Bates Clark Medal, an award presented by the American Economic Association every other year to an outstanding economist under the age of forty. Larry is an extraordinary research economist, as well as an active participant in economic policymaking, and to some degree a political figure. He served as a Staff Economist at the Council of Economic Advisers (1981-82), Chief Economist of the World Bank (1989-91), and is currently the Under-Secretary for International Affairs at the U.S. Treasury. This paper summarizes Larry's important research contributions.' The next four sections describe his work in the four fields of economics that were identified in the Clark Medal citation: public finance, labor economics, financial economics, and macroeconomics.2 Each section describes his substantive research contributions, and discusses novel aspects of his research strategy. The sheer quantity of Larry's published work has forced me to limit this survey to a fraction of his research, and I apologize at the outset to Larry, and his coauthors, for oversights or errors of omission. As is typical of papers of this

Gary S. Becker's career, personality, and contributions are reviewed and commented upon. Special note is taken of his seriousness of purpose, his willingness to take chances, and his persistence in the face of criticism and hostility. Becker's exceptional influence has taken several forms: enlargement of our understanding of traditional economic subjects such as labor economics, the opening up of new fields of research such as law and economics, and the transformation of other social sciences--especially sociology.

For the past thirty-five years, Herbert Scarf has made fundamental contributions in studies of inventories, the core, computation of equilibria, and integer programming. His work has simultaneously sought the most general and abstract formulations while simplifying the theory and bringing it closer to applications.

The purpose of economic inquiry is often described as an effort to explain—I will not use the treacherous word "predict"—the course of events by discovering regularities beneath the seemingly haphazard occurrences of economic life. Adam Smith searched for an invisible hand that bestowed self-regulation and growth on the market process; Marx sought laws of motion that would bring capitalism to its foreseeable fate; many contemporary economists discover rational utility maximization behind a vast array of activities. However different these order-bestowing forces, however diverse the scenarios to which they lead, all of them represent the analytical work that presumably sets economics apart from other ways of describing social life. This raises the question, of course, of what we mean by analysis—the basic issue to which this paper is addressed. Joseph Schumpeter becomes a central figure in the inquiry because he addressed himself to the question more directly than any of the major scenarists, answering it in a way that will make the meaning of my cryptic title clearer as we progress. For Schumpeter not only devoted the opening chapters of his magisterial History of Economic Analysis (1954) to an exploration of the scope of economic analysis, but he advanced a view of the analytic task very different from the axiomatic approach characteristic of so much analysis today. As he specifically defined it, economic analysis required "a command of techniques that we class under three heads: history, statistics, and 'theory'" (p. 12). This is a far cry from modern-day "choice theoretics." Nevertheless, however much his conception of analysis may differ from today's, there is no doubt that systematic investigation along "scientific" lines constituted a major purpose of Schumpeter's lifelong work. By combining historically guided

Paul Krugman is the winner of the 1991 John Bates Clark Medal, given every two years to “that American economist under forty who is adjudged to have made a significant contribution to economic thought and knowledge.” I shall attempt to convey a flavor of Krugman's research contributions, grouped into some major themes: product diversity and monopolistically competitive trade; oligopoly and strategic trade policy; the dynamics of trade and exchange rates; and much more. Finally I discuss his brilliant popular book, The Age of Diminished Expectations (1991).

The term “consumer sovereignty” is usually traced to William Harold Hutt and his 1936 book Economists and the Public: A Study of Competition and Opinion. Hutt paid only passing attention to the maximization of consumer welfare or the achievement of market efficiency. He was stalking different game. For him, the basic issues revolved around the exercise of power in a free society and those issues concerned sovereignty. Why should consumers be given such great power in determining the allocation of resources and the course of production? Hutt's major argument for consumer sovereignty centered on its role in promoting political and social stability. It is unlikely that Hutt's defense of consumer sovereignty will be embraced by the economics profession in the near future. It received only passing attention when first propounded and has largely disappeared from active discussion. Yet I would argue that his approach has a most interesting message.

Three pioneers of quantitative finance have now been justly honored: Harry Markowitz, Merton Miller, and William Sharpe received the Nobel Prize in Economic Science in 1990. From today's perspective it is hard to understand what finance was like before portfolio theory. Here I attempt to provide a very brief history of the quantitative revolution in finance, drawing upon P. Bernstein's Capital Ideas (1992) and accounts of the three Nobel laureates.

The nomination of Irving Kravis as a Distinguished Fellow of the American Economic Association in 1991 crowned a long and distinguished career. He would go on to no further accomplishments, for it was on the trip to the ASSA meetings in New Orleans to receive the award that he passed away at Philadelphia Airport on January 2, 1992. In spite of a debilitating illness, he had continued working until the end on problems and issues that were his main concerns for more than 50 years; with fuller physical powers, he would undoubtedly have made additional contributions to our profession. This paper first discusses his administrative and pedagogical contributions at the University of Pennsylvania and then his notable research contributions.

Ronald Coase wrote two great theoretical articles that earned him the Nobel Prize: "The Nature of the Firm" in 1937 and "The Problem of Social Cost" in 1960. He also wrote many articles dealing with the methodology of economics, often in the setting of a discussion of a particular economist, such as Adam Smith or Alfred Marshall. The methodological articles will be my particular focus here.

Victor Fuchs is a towering figure. His contributions to economics have spanned nearly 35 years. As his career has progressed, he has increasingly come to write on subjects of broad interest in a style that is accessible to noneconomists, thereby magnifying his influence. His gift is an ability to ask questions that are usually based on simple theory, but which nonetheless in his hands seem novel, and then proceed to answer those questions with simple, straightforward data analysis that is all the more powerful for its simplicity. Victor's work is usually “low tech,” to use his term, but almost always persuasive in ways that high-tech methods would not necessarily be. In this essay, I focus principally on Victor's contributions to the economics of health and medical care, but I have a bit to say about his other contributions as well.

Jacob Mincer has helped set the research agenda and professional style in labor economics for over 30 years. His research helped uncover the empirical content of human capital theory, where he used those ideas to study the determinants of earnings and the sources and nature of earnings inequality. He was also a pioneer in studying labor force participation decisions of married women. For the past decade, Jacob has set his characteristic stamp on the empirical study of job mobility. The following brief survey is meant to convey some of the flavor of Jacob Mincer's work and why it has been so influential in labor economics.

Vilfredo Pareto, using data for England, a number of Italian cities, several German states, Paris, and Peru, plotted cumulative distributions of income for these countries on double logarithmic paper. He claimed that in each case the result was a straight line with about the same slope. Thus, he asserted a law of income distribution. I discuss Pareto's discovery of this relationship; his theory of income distribution; Pareto's Law and Pareto optimality; the attack on Pareto's Law; the counterattack; and the more recent literature. For all the excesses of the Paretian camp followers, there remains the significant insight that the history of all hitherto existing society is a history of social hierarchies. There is the feel of structure behind income distributions. Something is going on here.

Maurice Allais is know for the 1952 “Allais paradox,” but other very important parts of his work remain virtually unknown to most economists. As Paul Samuelson (1983) wrote, “Had Allais' earliest writings been in English, a whole generation of economic theory would have taken a different course.” Perhaps the Nobel award will encourage economists to examine his work more closely. Let me first give a quick portrait of Maurice Allais, and then list some of his major contributions to the theory of markets, to the theory of capital, to decision making under risk and to monetary dynamics.

Guy Henderson Orcutt was born and grew up in Michigan, near Detroit, and had established a lifelong curiosity about how things work before he entered high school. His earliest efforts involved electrical devices and experiments, sometimes with explosive effects, but with continuing support and encouragement from his parents. His later efforts, as he progressed from engineering through physics to economics and econometrics, have given several generations of economists new ways to think about economic phenomena and new and better tools for investigating them. Guy has now moved to a new phase of his career and we can confidently expect further insights and inspiration from this distinctive and Distinguished Fellow of our Association. Most of Guy's career has been at four universities: Michigan, where he earned all three degrees, Harvard, Wisconsin, and Yale. In between, he spent periods at MIT, Cambridge University in England, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and The Urban Institute. To me, Guy is several persons rolled into one: inventor, visionary, empiricist, mentor and friend.

Trygve Haavelmo was in the United States from 1939 to 1947, and in this period he published most of his path-breaking contributions to econometrics for which the Nobel committee awarded him the prize. His list of publications after 1947 contains more than 100 items. We review his contributions to econometrics only briefly in order to cover his other research, which has focused on the relationship between population, natural resources, and growth; investment and capital theory; the notion of equilibrium and disequilibrium; the nature and stability of preferences; and the nature and problems of democracy.