The John Bates Clark Award And Me Getting Old

Yes, this is going to all be about me! ?

So, before getting to me, me, me, let me congratulate Emi Nakamura of the UC-Berkeley economics dept for receiving the John Bates Clark Award. It seems to be well deserved for her innovative and influential work on looking at high frequency detailed micro data sets to get more accurate estimates of macro variables, including both inflation rates and fiscal multipliers.  At 38 she is young enough (one must be under 40).  She is also now a coeditor of the American Economic Review.  I have seen some grumbling that her frequent coauthor and husband, Jon Steinnson, did not share in it or get it himself.  He is now too old at 42, and while her three most cited papers are coauthored with him, many others of hers are not, and several important papers of hers are sole authored.

As for how this relates to me, the really important part of this post, :-), I have never met her.  However, I know her mother, Alice Orcutt Nakamura, an economist at the University of  Alberta, who just happens to be the first woman ever to publish in the American Economic Review back in 1979. She was also the first woman president of the Canadian Economics Association in 1994-95.  She has done  lots of work on econmetrics, labor markets, and, interestingly, in the sort of micro studies of price changes that have since become a major focus of her daughter’s highly influential research.

But it does not stop there, this matter of me being so old I know the parents of currently prominent people (I have never met prez candidate Kamala Harris, but I know her dad, Don Harris, very well, a retired Post Keynesian economist out of Stanford). I also knew Emi’s maternal grandfather, Alice’s dad, the late Guy Orcutt, who was at the University of Wisconsin-Madison when I was.  He founded the Social Science Research Institute there and was a well-known econometrician, model for his daughter, most famous for his work on Cochrane-Orcutt estimators that can be used to correct for certain time-series correlations one finds out about using Durbin-Watson statistics.  Guy died in 2006, but I am sure he would have been proud of this achievement by his granddaughter.

Addendum: Alice Orcutt Nakamura’s husband, Masao, is also an economist, located at the University of British Columbia, and he and Alice have also coauthored many papers.

Barkley Rosser