Berkeley’s Emmanuel Saez Wins John Bates Clark Medal

The John Bates Clark Medal for 2009 has been awarded to Emmanuel Saez, a professor of economics at the University of California at Berkeley who specializes in taxation and income inequality. The American Economic Association announced the prize this afternoon.

The medal, which is given to an American economist under the age of 40, is widely regarded as one of the field’s most prestigious awards, perhaps second only to the Nobel in economic science. Previous winners include Milton Friedman, Paul Krugman, Steven Levitt, Paul A. Samuelson, and Lawrence H. Summers.

The French-born Mr. Saez, who is 36, earned his doctorate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1999. In a series of papers with Thomas Piketty, a professor at the Paris School of Economics, he has examined long-term trends in income inequality in the United States and other nations.

This line of work has sometimes drawn the two scholars into conflict with conservative skeptics.

But they also have fans in high places. As one of their critics recently pointed out, the Obama administration’s budget blueprint, A New Era of Responsibility, cites Mr. Saez and Mr. Piketty’s work as the source for a graph on inequality (see Page 11).

The Clark Medal has been awarded biennially since 1947. But in January, the association’s leaders voted to make it annual. If all goes according to plan, the first even-numbered year with a Clark winner will be 2010. —David Glenn