Frisch Medal of the Econometric Society is awarded to Nikolaus Wolf
This year’s Frisch Medal of the Econometric Society will be awarded to our School’s member Prof. Dr. Nikolaus Wolf together with Gabriel Ahlfeldt (London School of Economics), Stephen Redding (Princeton University) and Daniel Sturm (London School of Economics) for their paper “The Economics of Density: Evidence from the Berlin Wall“ published in 2015 in Econometrica.
In their article, the authors break new ground in the modelling of cities and the spatial organization of economic activity. Using data on Berlin in the 1930s, during Berlin’s partition between 1961 and 1989, and from today, Nikolaus Wolf and his co-authors can describe which internal and external factors contribute to the development of “blocks” with high innate productivity or with predominating residential amenities within a city and which consequences on the characteristics of such blocks sudden disturbances of these grown structures have, e.g. by changes in the transport network. The high credibility of the authors’ model allows to estimate consequences of today’s decisions in urban planning on the development of the structure of a city.
The Frisch Medal is named in honor of the Norwegian economist and co-founder of the Econometric Society, Ragnar Frisch, and is awarded every two years for empirical or theoretical applied research published in the journal Econometrica. Among the winners of the Frisch Medal are the economists Lars Peter Hansen and Angus Deaton who received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2013 and 2015, respectively.