We are proud to announce that former Penn Economics graduate Naoki Aizawa (Ph.D. 2014) has received the Prize for Best Paper in Quantitative Economics published in the past two years, awarded by the Econometric Society, for his paper "Labor Market Sorting and Health Insurance System Design" (Quantitative Economics, November 2019, Vol. 10, No. 4, 1401-1451). The prize-winning paper was part of Naoki's dissertation (Committee: Hanming Fang, Chair; Holger Sieg; Andrew Shephard; and Ken Wolpin). The paper studies the optimal joint design of major policies in the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and the implications of targeting these policies to certain individuals using an estimable life‐cycle equilibrium labor search model in which heterogeneous firms determine health insurance provisions and heterogeneous workers sort themselves into jobs with different compensation packages over the life cycle. The single paper winner is selected from all papers published in Quantitative Economics during the previous two years by an external committee appointed by the President of the Society. This year’s committee consisted of Jose Victor Rios Rull (Chair), Francesca Molinari, and Jean-Marc Robin.
See https://www.econometricsociety.org/content/2021-best-paper-prize-awarded for the official announcement.