2012 O₂ Prize

This year is funding a prize of 5,000 euros for the most outstanding journal article in the field of health, education, and welfare published in the e-journal.

We are proud to announce the winning contribution of the 2012 Prize:

“Uncertain Retirement and the Effects of Social Insurance on Savings, Wealth, and Welfare” by Neil Bruce and Stephen J. Turnovsky

In this paper the authors develop a tractable overlapping generations model based on the Blanchard finite horizon model. It provides a convenient framework to analyze the impact of social insurance policies on saving and consumption rates, the level of wealth and its distribution, both by workers and retirees, as well as the corresponding economy-wide aggregates. The model is also used to analyze welfare effects and to characterize optimal social insurance policies.

Neil Bruce is currently the Paul F. Glaser Professor of Economics at the University of Washington in Seattle. After completing his B.A. and M.A. in Canada, he earned his Ph.D. in Economics (1975) at the University of Chicago, where he studied Public Finance with Arnold C. Harberger. Bruce specializes in Public Finance, teaching courses to graduate and undergraduates, supervising numerous dissertations on the subject. He has published widely on taxation, public goods, social security and welfare in professional journals and books. In recent years, Bruce has collaborated with Professor Stephen J. Turnovsky in constructing computational demographic models of economic growth.

Stephen J. Turnovsky received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1968 and currently holds the Van Voorhis Professorship of Economics at the University of Washington. His main area of research is in the general area of macroeconomic dynamics and growth. Within this area his interests are quite far-ranging, with particular interests in fiscal policy issues and optimal policy, and extending to both closed economies and open economies. He is the author of several books, as well as having edited several volumes and written many journal articles.

Criteria for the prize were as follows:  

• Scientific quality of the paper
• Use of innovative approaches and methods
• Innovative solutions to relevant problems in the field of health, education, and welfare

Nominated journal articles were ranked by a jury of highly qualified researchers.

Members of the jury were:

• Kate Bundorf, Associate Professor, Health Research & Policy - Health Services Research, Stanford University,
• Colm Harmon, Professor of Economics at the University College Dublin (UCD) and Director of the UCD Geary Institute
• Stefan Klasen, Professor of Economics at the University of Göttingen
• Dennis Snower, President of the Kiel Institute for the World Economy

Nominees

2013-22	Joseph Deutsch, Alessio Fusco, and Jacques Silber The BIP Trilogy (Bipolarization, Inequality and Polarization): One Saga but Three Different Stories May 23, 2013 | JEL: I31, D63, D31
2013-15	Rosa María García-Fernández, Daniel Gottlieb, and Federico Palacios-González Polarization, Growth and Social Policy in the Case of Israel, 1997–2008 April 16, 2013 | JEL: H54, I21, I3, J1, O15, O53
2012-42	Gordon Anderson Boats and Tides and "Trickle Down" Theories: What Economists Presume about Wellbeing When They Employ Stochastic Process Theory in Modeling Behavior November 19, 2012 | JEL: C22, D63, D91, I32, O47
2012-28	Carsten Schröder and Timm Bönke Country Inequality Rankings and Conversion Schemes July 17, 2012 | JEL: D31, D63, I32
2012-8	Subbu Subramanian The Focus Axiom and Poverty: On the Co-existence of Precise Language and Ambiguous Meaning in Economic Measurement March 26, 2012 | JEL: B40, D31, D63, I32, O15
2012-7	Sami Bibi, Jean-Yves Duclos, and Audrey Verdier-Chouchane Assessing Absolute and Relative Pro-Poor Growth, with an Application to Selected African Countries March 23, 2012 | JEL: D63, I32
2012-2	John Beath, Joanna Poyago-Theotoky, and David Ulph University Funding Systems: Impact on Research and Teaching January 12, 2012 | JEL: I21, I22, I23
2011-17	Eduardo de Carvalho Andrade and Luciano I. de Castro Tougher Educational Exam Leading to Worse Selection October 19, 2011 | JEL: I2, J24
2011-13	Joseph Deutsch and Jacques Silber On Various Ways of Measuring Pro-Poor Growth September 09, 2011 | JEL: I32, O15
2011-12	Tinh Doan and Philip Stevens Labour Market Returns to Higher Education in Vietnam September 02, 2011 | JEL: C31, J31, O15
2011-11	Gordon Anderson Polarization Measurement and Inference in Many Dimensions When Subgroups Can Not Be Identified August 29, 2011 | JEL: C14, C30, I32
2011-8	Hélène Blake and Marc Sangnier Senior Activity Rate, Retirement Incentives, and Labor Relations June 30, 2011 | JEL: J14, J26, Z10
2010-14	Muhammad Jami Husain Contribution of Health to Economic Development: A Survey and Overview April 28, 2010 | JEL: I10, J11, O40
2009-30	Daniel Gottlieb and Leonid Kushnir Social Policy Targeting and Binary Information Transfer between Surveys June 23, 2009 | JEL: C15, D63, I38, Z12
2009-3	Michael C. Lovell Social Security’s Five OASI Inflation Indexing Problems February 24, 2009 | JEL: H55
2008-29	Harald Tauchmann West-East Convergence in the Prevalence of Cannabis Use: Socioeconomics or Culture? September 29, 2008 | JEL: I12, P23, P36
2007-13	Ekkehart Schlicht Wage Dispersion, Over-Qualification, and Reder Competition November 13, 2007 | JEL: D43, J31, J63
2007-2	Neil Bruce and Stephen J. Turnovsky Uncertain Retirement and the Effects of Social Insurance on Savings, Wealth, and Welfare May 14, 2007 | JEL: D91, E10, J20