Awards and Academic Performance

Awards may honour and induce performance. There are many different academic awards, ranging from the Nobel Prizes to best paper awards, and to awards for young scholars and rising stars. The Synthetic Control Method allows us to show empirically that the performance of recipients of the well-known John Bates Clark Medal (given by the American Economic Association to a scholar under the age of 40 ‘who is judged to have made the most significant contribution to economic thought and knowledge’) subsequently increases. Clark Medallists raise their publication activity and the work they had previously published is cited considerably more often (in line with a status effect). The same effects can be observed when researchers are elected as Fellows of the Econometric Society, also a prestigious honour.