GSB’s Piazzesi receives two economics honors

Monika Piazzesi, Professor of Finance in the Graduate School of Business, has received the Elaine Bennett Research Prize given by the American Economic Association’s Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession. The third Chicago faculty member to win this prize, she also is the recent recipient of the Bernácer Prize, honoring her as the best European economist under the age of 40.

Given once every two years, the Bennett prize recognizes outstanding research by a female economist who is at the beginning of her career. Both Marianne Bertrand, the Fred G. Steingraber/A.T. Kearney Professor of Economics in the GSB, and Judith Chavalier, former Professor of Finance in the GSB, now at Yale University’s School of Management, have won the honor; Chevalier in 1998 and Bertrand in 2004.

Piazzesi is the second faculty member of the GSB to win the Bern‡cer Prize since it was first given in 2001. Luigi Zingales, the Robert C. McCormack Professor of Entrepreneurship and Finance in the GSB, won in 2003. The bank La Caja de Ahorros del Mediterráneo, in Madrid, Spain, conferred the Bernácer Prize on Piazzesi earlier this year.

Piazzesi, who also is the John Huizinga Faculty Fellow in the GSB, is a macroeconomist specializing in financial economics and applied time series analysis. She has developed influential models of the yield curve for bonds, incorporating crucial macroeconomic factors such as the actions of central banks and measures of business cycle fluctuations. As a direct response to her research, the Federal Reserve changed its forecasting models.

She is an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow and previously was a Houblon-Norman Fund Fellow at the Bank of England. Piazzesi will receive the Bennett prize Friday, Jan. 5, 2007, during a ceremony in Chicago at the annual meeting of the American Economics Association’s Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession.