2019 Kuznets Prize Awarded to Yoo-Mi Chin & Nicholas Wilson

Yoo-Mi Chin (Baylor University) and Nicholas Wilson (Reed College) received the 2019 Kuznets Prize for their article “Disease risk and fertility: evidence from the HIV/AIDS pandemic” which was published in the Journal of Population Economics (2018), 31(2), pp. 429-451. The annual prize honors the best article published in the Journal of Population Economics.

1  Biographical Abstracts

Yoo-Mi Chin is an Assistant Professor of Economics at Baylor University and a Fellow at the Global Labor Organization (GLO). Before that, she was an Assistant Professor at  Missouri University of Science & Technology. She received her PhD in Economics from Brown University in 2007. Her research interests center on gender and development, welfare of children, health, and crime. Her work has been published in journals that include Applied Economics Letters, Journal of Health Economics, Journal of Population Economics, Review of Economics of the Household, and World Development.

Nicholas Wilson is a Fellow with the Office of Evaluation Sciences and an Associate Professor of Economics at Reed College as well as a Fellow at the Global Labor Organization (GLO).  His research focuses on fundamental puzzles about human behavior in the context of health, development, and behavioral economics. The National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), the University of Chicago Population Center, and the International Initiative for Impact Evaluation (3ie) have funded his work.  Prior to joining Reed College, he was a Visiting Scholar at the University of California, Berkeley and an Assistant Professor of Economics at Williams College. He has published in journals like the American Economic Review, Demography, Economics & Human Biology, Journal of Development Economics and Journal of Health Economics.

2  Abstract of the Winning Paper

“A fundamental question about human behavior is whether fertility responds to disease risk. The standard economic theory of household fertility decision-making generates ambiguous predictions, and the response has large implications for human welfare. We examine the fertility response to the HIV/AIDS pandemic using national household survey data from 14 sub-Saharan African countries. Instrumental variable (IV) estimates using distance to the origin of the pandemic suggest that HIV/AIDS has increased the total fertility rate (TFR) and the number of surviving children. These results rekindle the debate about the fertility response to disease risk, particularly the HIV/AIDS pandemic, and highlight the question of whether the HIV/AIDS pandemic has reduced GDP per capita.”

3  About the Kuznets Prize

 The Journal of Population Economics awards the ‘Kuznets Prize’ for the best paper published in the Journal of Population Economics in the previous year. Starting from 2014 the Prize has been awarded annually. Papers are judged by the Editors of the Journal.

Simon Kuznets, a pioneer in population economics, Professor Emeritus at Harvard University and the 1971 Nobel Prize laureate in economics, died on July 10, 1985. Professor Kuznets was born 1901 in Pinsk, Belarus, and came to the United States in 1922. He earned his Bachelor of Science in 1923, a Master of Arts degree in 1924 and his doctorate in 1926, all from Columbia University. During World War II he was Associate Director of the Bureau of Planning and Statistics on the War Production Board, and he served on the staff of the National Bureau of Economic Research from 1927 to 1960. Mr. Kuznets was a faculty member at the University of Pennsylvania for 24 years and Professor of Political Economy at Johns Hopkins University from 1954 until he joined Harvard University in 1960. He retired in 1971 and was given the title of George F. Baker Professor Emeritus of Economics. He was a former president of the American Economic Association and the American Statistical Association.

4  Previous Winners

The Kuznets Prize has previously been awarded to:

• 2018: Chunbei Wang and Le Wang (University of Oklahoma) for their article “Knot yet: Minimum marriage age law, marriage delay, and earnings,” Journal of Population Economics 30(3): pp. 771-804.
• 2017: Binnur Balkan (Stockholm School of Economics) and Semih Tumen (Central Bank of the Republic of Turkey) for their article “Immigration and prices: quasi-experimental evidence from Syrian refugees in Turkey,” Journal of Population Economics 29(3): pp. 657-686.
• 2016: Loren Brandt (University of Toronto), Aloysius Siow (University of Toronto), and Hui Wang (Peking University) for their article “Compensating for unequal parental investments in schooling,” Journal of Population Economics 28: 423-462.
• 2015: Haoming Liu (National University of Singapore) for his article “The quality–quantity trade-off: evidence from the relaxation of China’s one-child policy”, Journal of Population Economics 27: 565-602.
• 2014: Paolo Masella (University of Essex) for his article “National Identity and Ethnic Diversity”, Journal of Population Economics 26: 437-454.
• Period 2010-2012: Richard W. Evans (Brigham Young University), Yingyao Hu (Johns Hopkins University) and Zhong Zhao (Renmin University) for their article “The fertility effect of catastrophe: US hurricane births”, Journal of Population Economics 23: 1-36.
• Period 2007-2009: Makoto Hirazawa (Nagoya University) and Akira Yakita (Nagoya University) for their article ” Fertility, child care outside the home, and pay-as-you-go social security “, Journal of Population Economics 22: 565-583.
• Period 2004-2006: Jinyoung Kim (Korea University) received the Kuznets Prize for his article “Sex selection and fertility in a dynamic model of conception and abortion,” Journal of Population Economics 18: 041-067.
• Period 2001–2003: Olympia Bover (Bank of Spain) and Manuel Arellano (CEMFI), for their article “Learning about migration decisions from the migrants: Using complementary datasets to model intra-regional migrations in Spain”, Journal of Population Economics 15:357–380.
• Period 1998–2000: David C. Ribar (The George Washington University), for his article “The socioeconomic consequences of young women’s childbearing: Reconciling disparate evidence”, Journal of Population Economics 12: 547–565.
• Period 1995–1997: James R. Walker (University of Wisconsin-Madison), for his article “The effect of public policies on recent Swedish fertility behavior”, Journal of Population Economics, 8: 223–251.