Clark Medal Winner Levin Discusses Economics


来源：华尔街日报
[size=1.3em]Stanford University economist Jonathan Levin, won the American Economic Association‘s John Bates Clark medal, awarded to the nation’s most promising economist under the age of 40, last Friday.


[size=1.3em]An expert in industrial organization — the study of how firms and markets interact with each other — Levin has done work on subprime lending (before “subprime” was a dirty word), health insurance and internet markets. He talked with the Wall Street Journal’s Justin Lahart. Here are excerpts:
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[size=1.3em]How would you describe your approach to economics?
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[size=1.3em]Levin: I work in industrial organization, which is basically the study of how industries are organized and how their affected by competition and regulation and so forth. And I work in market design, which is in a sense a subfield of industrial organization that focuses on thinking about how to design allocation mechanisms and how to design markets to achieve different purposes.
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[size=1.3em]Most of my work just studies what makes different sorts of industries more competitive, or what makes markets work efficiently or inefficiently. I’ve worked on subprime lending. Recently I’ve been doing a lot of work on Internet markets – I’m very interested in the way technology has changed the way markets are organized and the way firms behave. I’ve done work on how to design auctions for natural resources like timber.
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[size=1.3em]I’m interested in how you can use economic theory to better understand different markets. How you can bring the theory together with empirical evidence from different settings to try to understand what makes markets work efficiently or inefficiently and how you can design rules for markets to make them work better.
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[size=1.3em]What piece of your research do you feel is most influential?
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[size=1.3em]Levin: When I started in graduate school in economics, I was basically an economic theorist. I was doing game theory models. I was of building models of relationships in long-term contracts, like employment relationships and the relationships between firms. I don’t know if it’s the most influential thing but it’s the most cited thing that I’ve worked on, because that model got picked up and has been used by a lot of people to study problems in the economics of organizations and contracting.
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[size=1.3em]But as I went along, I got much more interested in how you could bring modern economic theories to think about really practical problems. How you could bring them together with data to see how well they worked to describe different settings and make predictions and test hypotheses.
[size=1.3em]It seems like there’s this group of younger economists, including you, Amy Finkelstein, Matthew Gentzkow, Raj Chetty and Jesse Shapiro, that is combining classical economic thinking with empirical research to find answers to real world problems.
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[size=1.3em]Levin: That’s a great set of people and one I’d certainly be happy to be a member of. Those people are primarily empirical economists who are building on this movement in economics to think about how to use good experimental variation in data, and how to interpret the findings in the context of economic models.
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[size=1.3em]Another group is people like Susan Athey, my frequent coauthor, who started in economic theory and then got interested in how you could take the theory and make it really, really practical. How could we take what we’ve learned from the mathematical theory of auctions, or mathematical theories of information economics, and actually do it. How could you find interesting markets in the world and apply those ideas, and when would they apply?
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[size=1.3em]My colleague Paul Milgrom is a great example. He’s a very theoretical economist, but then got interested in how do you design auctions to sell spectrum, and he designed that the FCC uses to sell radio spectrum.
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[size=1.3em]That’s the other area I would see as my home in economics. Thinking about how to translate theories into real world problem solving.