MIT economist Whitney Newey PhD ’83, the Ford Professor of Economics, emeritus, has obtained the 2026 Erwin Plein Nemmers Prize in Economics.
The biennial Nemmers prizes from Northwestern College acknowledge high students for his or her lasting contributions to new data, excellent achievements, and the event of great new modes of study.
The college cited Newey — whose analysis has targeted on econometrics — for producing “a physique of labor that has formed the sector of semiparametric econometrics, guided each econometricians and empirical researchers over a number of a long time, and helped lay the foundations for contemporary machine learning-based inference.”
Newey will work together with Northwestern school and college students by way of programming scheduled to happen in the course of the 2026-27 tutorial yr. The prize additionally features a $300,000 award.
“I’m delighted, deeply honored, and really grateful,” says Newey of the glory. “I’m thrilled to have labored on and now work on concepts and approaches which can be essential for contemporary, machine learning-based inference and trendy empirical economics extra usually, most of this with such succesful collaborators. This prize will expedite this work.”
Newey has been a number one determine in econometric idea for greater than 4 a long time, shaping each analysis and coaching within the discipline. He has accomplished pathbreaking work on variance estimation, nonparametric simultaneous equations, shopper surplus estimation with basic heterogeneity, and debiased machine studying.
“My colleagues and I are thrilled to see Whitney’s unimaginable profession acknowledged with this excessive honor,” says Jonathan Gruber, the Ford Professor of Economics and head of the Division of Economics. “His analysis has given beginning to most of the econometric strategies that at the moment are second nature to economists, and people of us in his orbit additionally know him as a supply of sage, complete, and beneficiant recommendation. Whitney symbolizes, by way of each his pathbreaking analysis and his nice generosity, what has made MIT economics so nice for thus a few years.”
Newey is a distinguished fellow of the American Financial Affiliation, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a fellow of the Econometric Society. He’s additionally a fellow of the Worldwide Affiliation of Utilized Econometrics, of CEMP at Jinan College, and a global fellow of the Centre for Microdata Strategies and Observe (CEMMAP) at College School London. He earned a BA and a PhD in economics from Brigham Younger College and MIT, respectively.
Newey was named a 2020 Distinguished Fellow by the American Financial Affiliation. He has been a fellow of the Middle for Superior Examine within the Behavioral Sciences and obtained a Sloan Basis Analysis Fellowship. He has served as co-editor of Econometrica — a journal produced by the Econometric Society — and as program co-chair for the World Congress of the Econometric Society. He has additionally served on the Econometric Society’s Govt Committee. He beforehand taught economics at Princeton College and at MIT, and in addition beforehand served as the pinnacle of MIT’s Division of Economics. He has been a visiting scholar, professor, and lecturer at establishments the world over.
