2025 Award Recipients (in alphabetical order of author):
Paper: Amenity Biased Technical Change
Author: Gerard Maideu-Morera
Motivation: A job is more than just a wage but is also characterised by its non-pecuniary characteristics such as flexibility, safety, work-life balance, and job satisfaction. This paper asks whether non-wage amenities have a first-order impact on our understanding of changes in productivity and welfare in the macroeconomy. Using US data from 1980, the paper first documents a significant shift in labor demand from low-amenity occupations (like manufacturing and lower-skilled service jobs) to high-amenity occupations (such as managerial, professional, and technical positions). It then explores the implications of this shift for productivity growth and labor market polarization, both theoretically and empirically. Notably, the paper finds no polarization in the growth of total compensation across the skill distribution, in contrast to the typical finding of a u-shaped pattern in wage growth. The paper’s novel and careful combination of micro and macro-labour perspectives to shed new light on important macroeconomic trends made this paper stand out as worthy of a prize.
Paper: Growth with New and Old Technologies
Author: Bernardo S. C. Ribeiro
Motivation: This paper documents two novel empirical regularities about innovation and technology vintages and interprets them through the lens of a growth model. Using two centuries of U.S. patent data, it documents that innovations are most frequent in technologies of intermediate age, and that this hump-shaped distribution has remained remarkably stable over time. The proposed model of technology vintages explains these patterns and highlights a systematic misallocation of R&D, with private incentives favoring mature technologies over emerging ones. By quantifying the welfare gains from reallocating research effort toward younger technologies, the paper offers valuable insights for innovation policy and long-run growth. Its careful blend of empirical evidence, theory, and quantitative evaluation makes it a strong and prize-worthy contribution to the field of economic growth.
Paper: Public Roads on Private Lands: Land Costs and Optimal Road Improvements in Urban Uganda
Authors: Jeanne Sorin
Motivation: Transportation infrastructure are essential for development in developing cities, but empirical evidence on their net returns is still scarse. This paper studies the costs and benefits associated with road improvements in the context of Kampala (Uganda). Using novel data from a variety of sources, it combines reduced-form estimation with a quantitative spatial model and discusses optimal policy. It shows that, while road improvements lead to net welfare gains, these benefits could be negative if land acquisition were done at market value, due to the
high cost of raising domestic funds. In terms of policy implications, the results highlights the need to account for existing property rights and land acquisition conditions, when designing infrastructure investments in rapidly growing cities. A fascinating research question, answered using novel data, reduced-form estimation, and a quantitative spatial model makes this paper a prize-worthy contribution.
Award Committee: Abi Adams, Johannes Boehm and Mara Squicciarini
Full details here.