AEA Distinguished Service Award
The AEA Distinguished Service Award recognizes the volunteer efforts of individuals who have served the profession. This service may have been under the auspices of the AEA, but this is not required.
The award winner will be recognized annually at the ASSA meetings. Travel expenses to the meetings, up to $2,000, will be reimbursed.
2024 Award Winner
Rachel T.A. Croson, University of Minnesota
(receiving award from AEA President-elect, Larry Katz)
Rachel T.A. Croson is the 2024 recipient of the AEA’s Distinguished Service Award. She is currently the Executive Vice President and Provost and a McKnight Endowed Professor of Economics at the University of Minnesota. Prior to this she served as Dean of the College of Social Science and MSU Foundation Professor of Economics; Dean of the School of Business at the University of Texas at Arlington, and division director for Social and Economic Sciences at the National Science Foundation. She also held faculty positions at UT Dallas and the Wharton School. She earned her bachelor’s degree from the University of Pennsylvania and her PhD in economics from Harvard University. Her research is in behavioral and experimental economics.
The selection committee recognizes Dr. Croson’s significant contributions to the discipline of economics through her varied and numerous administrative leadership roles. The committee was also especially impressed with Dr. Croson’s pivotal role in advancing the status of women in the economics profession. For example, she was one of the principal investigators on the National Science Foundation grant to the American Economic Association that led to the creation of CeMENT workshops for junior women faculty in economics with Francine Blau, Janet Currie, KimMarie McGoldrick, and John Siegfried. Dr. Croson served as the organizer for these workshops and helped to design and implement the evaluation of these workshops. Dr. Croson’s publications with the evaluation team of Francine Blau, Janet Currie and Donna Ginther showed that the CeMENT program increased mentored women’s publications, their publications in top five journals, and the likelihood that they received tenure in top 50 economics departments. In addition to this work, Dr. Croson has served as a mentor to countless female economists. Her work in advancing the status of women in economics was also recognized with the 2017 Carolyn Shaw Bell Award from the AEA. We are the extremely fortunate beneficiaries of her early, sustained, and significant service to the discipline of economics and the economics profession.
Rules and Eligibility
A nominee must be a current member of the AEA. The service contribution should impact the field of economics in a significant and positive way on a national scale. The length of service time is not as important as the impact of one or several activities. The service to be recognized may comprise a variety of activities, but must be beyond that of a single institution and impactful on a national scale. While this award is conferred by the AEA, it is not expected that service be limited to AEA supported activities.
Nomination and Selection Process
Nomination requires:
- A nomination letter of no more than 500 words. Self-nominations are not accepted.
- Nominee’s professional Vita, not to exceed 5 pages.
- At least 3 but no more than 5 letters of support from individuals or groups that are familiar with the nominee’s work. Letters should not exceed two pages.
The portal for nominations opens in April, and nominations are due by October 31. Nominees who are not selected are automatically placed in the pool of nominees for the subsequent year for a period of three years. Nomination packets will not need to be resubmitted, but any (brief) updates to materials are welcome.
Previous Winners
2023 | Christopher F. Baum, Boston College
Christopher (“Kit”) Baum is a Professor of Economics at Boston College. He obtained his Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Michigan in 1977. With this award, the AEA wishes to recognize Christopher (“Kit”) Baum for his multi-decade volunteering effort to promote open-source repositories, transparency, and reproducibility within the profession. Kit established the Statistical Software Components (SSC) archive in 1997 and has been the custodian of this archive ever since. SSC is a repository containing user-written software for statistical analysis. SSC has made it possible for software users to easily access programming packages, such as data management utilities, estimation routines, as well as post-estimation and output processing routines. When you type ssc describe <packagename>, or ssc install <packagename> in Stata, and all your problems go away, this is all thanks to Kit! The number of programming packages on SSC now stands at more than 3,000, with a per-month average of over 300 hits per package. Kit’s setting up and maintaining of SSC have made and continue to make a massive contribution to the empirical research community worldwide and have helped democratize access to methods at the frontier of econometrics.
2022 | Christopher “Kitt” Carpenter, Vanderbilt University
Kitt Carpenter is the inaugural recipient of the AEA’s Distinguished Service Award. He is the E. Bronson Ingram University Distinguished Professor of Economics and Health Policy at Vanderbilt University, Director of its Program in Public Policy Studies, and the Founder and Director of Vanderbilt’s LGBTQ+ Policy Lab. Carpenter is also Director of the NBER Health Economics Program, Editor at the Journal of Health Economics, a member of the National Advisory Council for the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, President-Elect of the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management, and Co-Founder and Co-Chair of the American Economic Association’s Committee on the Status of LGBTQ+ Individuals in the Economics Profession (CSQIEP). He was named the 2021-22 Joseph A. Johnson, Jr., Distinguished Leadership Professor at Vanderbilt for his contributions to Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion. Professor Carpenter has published widely on the effects of legal same-sex marriage, the causes and consequences of youth substance use, and the effects of public policies on health behaviors such as bicycle helmet use, seatbelt use, smoking, cancer screening, and vaccination. His research has been continuously supported by the National Institutes of Health, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the American Cancer Society. Professor Carpenter's colleagues, students, and the profession at large hold him in high esteem for his selfless and persistent efforts to foster a welcoming environment for all economists and others aspiring to join our ranks.