再次证明机制设计和拍卖还没有死；再次证明MIT的经济学教育和研究不是唬人的。看加红的文字。
Stanford's Jonathan Levin Wins John Bates Clark Medal
来源：华尔街日报
Jonathan Levin, an economist who has done pioneering work on market structure and how businesses interact, won the John Bates Clark metal, given to the most promising economist in the U.S. under the age of 40.
Announcing the prize Friday, the American Economic Association said the 38-year old Stanford University economist's "work stands out for its combination of theoretical depth, empirical methods, and compelling applications."
The Clark is often called the "Baby Nobel," because so many winners go on to win Nobel Prizes. Of the 33 economists who have won, 12 became Nobel laureates, including Paul Samuelson and Milton Friedman. Former White House National Economic Council Director Lawrence Summers is another past winner.
Mr. Levin's early research was on the nature of long-term contractual relationships, such as those between employees and employers. But over time, he shifted his focus.
"I got much more interested in how you could start using modern economic theories to think about really practical problems," Mr. Levin said. "How you could bring them together with data to see how well they worked to describe different settings and make predictions and test hypotheses."
One example is his research into subprime lending. Mr. Levin, working with two other economists, tapped data on the used-car market to examine borrowers' behavior—and test theories of what motivates them to take loans. They found that for higher risk "subprime" borrowers, a $100 increase in a required down payment led to as much of a decrease in demand for a vehicle as a $3000 price hike.
That research was first circulated in 2006, well before it became clear how low- and no-downpayment subprime mortgages led many people to take on more housing debt than they could afford. Problems with those loans ultimately precipitated the 2008 financial crisis.
Mr. Levin was steeped in economics from an early age: His father, Yale University president Richard Levin, is an economist. As an undergraduate at Stanford he studied English and mathematics, he said, and it wasn't until graduate work in economics at Oxford University that he became enamored of the subject. He received his doctorate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1999, and was in the same Ph.D. class as Emmanuel Saez and Esther Duflo, the previous two Clark winners.
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