Ufuk Akcigit

Last updated
Ufuk Akcigit
Ufuk Akcigit at Saieh Hall.png
Born (1980-05-23) May 23, 1980 (age 43)
Germany
NationalityTurkish
Academic career
Institutions• University of Chicago
(2015–present)

• University of Pennsylvania
(2009–2015)
• NBER (2018–present)
• CEPR (2016–present)
• Brookings Institution
(2019–present)

• Halle Institute (2020–present)

Contents

Alma materMassachusetts Institute of Technology (PhD 2009)
Koc University (BA 2003)
Doctoral
advisor
Daron Acemoglu
Website www.ufukakcigit.com

Ufuk Akcigit (born 23 May 1980) is a Turkish economist. [1] He is the Arnold C. Harberger Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago, the Kenneth C. Griffin Department of Economics since 2019. The same year, he also received the Max Planck-Humboldt Research Award for his achievements in the field of macroeconomics. [2] In 2021, he was named John Simon Guggenheim Fellow and Econometric Society fellow for his work in Economics. [3] In 2022, he received the Global Economy Prize in Economics from the Kiel Institute in Germany and the Sakıp Sabancı International Research Award. [4] [5]

Life

Ufuk Akcigit was born to Turkish parents in Germany. He moved back to his hometown Bursa, with his parents when he was four-years old. He earned his middle and high education degrees from Ankara Anatolian High School. He was interested in Mathematics and Economics from an early age. In 2003, he obtained his bachelor's degree in economics from Koç University. [6] Upon graduation, he completed his doctoral studies and earned a Ph.D. degree with his thesis on Industrial Policy and Economic Growth, from MIT in 2009. [1]

Academic career

After his doctoral studies, Akcigit started working as an assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania. In 2015, he moved to the University of Chicago as an assistant professor, got promoted to associate professor in 2018 and finally to a full Professor in 2019. He is the Arnold C. Harberger Professor since 2020. [1] He recently founded and is running a research group in Chicago that uses large-scale firm and individual level micro datasets to uncover how talent allocation, human capital, industrial policies, competitive landscape, academia, and institutions influence economic growth through innovation and ideas.[6] As winner of the Max Planck-Humboldt Research Award, he also has a dedicated research team in Germany that focuses on the Economic Gap between East and West Germany. [7]

As of 2021, he holds Research Associate positions at the National Bureau of Economic Research, Center for Economic Policy Research, Brookings Institution, Halle Institute, Rimini Centre for Economic Analysis, and CESifo. In 2016, he was named Distinguished Research Fellow by Koc University where he completed his undergraduate studies. [1]

In 2021, he was named Econometric Society Fellow and John Simon Guggenheim Fellow. [8] In 2022, he received the Global Economy Prize in Economics from the Kiel Institute in Germany and the Sakıp Sabancı International Research Award. [4] [5]

Research

As a macroeconomist, Akcigit's research focuses on understanding the links between innovation and economic growth and coming up with optimal policies to bolster them. He has been a pioneer in the field of "Quantitative Economic Growth" which combines economic models with micro-level data to study innovation and economic growth. He focuses on 3 aspects that connect innovation and aggregate economic growth: 1) Firms 2) Inventors 3) Ideas. To understand each aspect, he believes a combination of microeconomic and macroeconomic perspectives should be used.

His first line of research, on firms, consists of several papers that uncover firms in developed and developing countries. He has focused on how firms have different types of innovations, and the quality of these innovations have important economic growth implications. Looking at the life cycle of firms and innovation in developing countries, his work shows that these countries suffer from low creative destruction. He also studies the interplay of taxation and innovation, uncovering what incentives governments provide to firms to innovate using taxes and subsidies. [9]

Furthermore, he investigates the factors determining who becomes an inventor and uncovers that IQ, education and parental background are key ingredients. [10] Switching gears, he is currently working on who becomes an entrepreneur and believes that parental background has a stronger effect on career choice for entrepreneurs than IQ. [11]

As part of his thoughts on creative destruction, Akcigit examines inventors themselves to uncover their incentives to innovate and their effect on society. He focuses on modern-time inventors, historical inventors, and their interactions in society.

Akcigit also focuses on ideas as the "seeds of economic growth". He particularly focuses on how ideas are generated and how they are materialized. He shows that ideas are not necessarily born to the best users to ensure utilization, an established patent system is crucial for idea transformation. He uses large scale datasets such as social security records, firm balance sheets and patent microdata to advance his research. [9]

Taking a step back to look at the business dynamism and market dynamics itself, Akcigit argues that upon decreased knowledge diffusion, corporate market power has risen in recent decades. This resulted in an increased corporate market power and market concentration. He then examines how do firms respond to these changing dynamics in the economy. He uses firm and state based micro data to uncover these effects. [12] [13] With a group of researches from the International Monetary Fund, Akcigit investigated these issues across different countries, publishing their findings on a report entitled "Rising Corporate Market Power: Emerging Policy Issues". [14]

Finally, he focuses on income inequality arguing that  innovation is positively correlated with the former. He uses cross state panel U.S. Data to work on income inequality and social mobility. [15]

Awards

Selected bibliography

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Simon Kuznets</span> American economist and statistician (1901–1984)

Simon Smith Kuznets was an Russian-born American economist and statistician who received the 1971 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences "for his empirically founded interpretation of economic growth which has led to new and deepened insight into the economic and social structure and process of development."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Edmund Phelps</span> American economist

Edmund Strother Phelps is an American economist and the recipient of the 2006 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Daron Acemoglu</span> Turkish-American economist

Kamer Daron Acemoğlu is a Turkish-born American economist who has taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology since 1993, where he is currently the Elizabeth and James Killian Professor of Economics. He received the John Bates Clark Medal in 2005, and was named an Institute Professor at MIT in 2019.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Michael Kremer</span> American economist and Nobel laureate (born 1964)

Michael Robert Kremer is an American development economist currently serving as University Professor in Economics at the University of Chicago and Director of the Development Innovation Lab at the Becker Friedman Institute for Research in Economics. Kremer formerly served as the Gates Professor of Developing Societies at Harvard University, a role he held from 2003 to 2020. In 2019, Kremer was jointly awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, together with Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee, "for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dale W. Jorgenson</span> American economist (1933–2022)

Dale Weldeau Jorgenson was an American economist who served as the Samuel W. Morris University Professor at Harvard University. An influential econometric scholar, he was famed for his work on the relationship between productivity and economic growth, the economics of climate change, and the intersection between economics and statistics. Described as a "master" of his field, he received the John Bates Clark Medal in 1971, and was described as a worthy contender for the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Elhanan Helpman</span> Israeli economist

Elhanan Helpman is an Israeli economist who is currently the Galen L. Stone Professor of International Trade at Harvard University. He is also a Professor Emeritus at the Eitan Berglas School of Economics at Tel Aviv University. Helpman is among the thirty most cited economists in the world according to IDEAS/RePEc.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Debraj Ray (economist)</span> Indian-American economist (born 1957)

Debraj Ray is an Indian-American economist, who is currently teaching and working at New York University. His research interests focus on development economics and game theory. Ray served as Co-editor of the American Economic Review between 2012 and 2020.

Philippe Mario Aghion is a French economist who is a professor at the Collège de France, at INSEAD, and at the London School of Economics. He also teaches at the Paris School of Economics. From 2002 to 2015, he was the Robert C. Waggoner Professor of Economics at Harvard University. Prior to that, he was a professor at University College London, an Official Fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford, and an assistant professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Stephen Charles Smith is an economist, author, and educator. He is Chair of the Department of Economics, and Professor of Economics and International Affairs at George Washington University. He is also a Research Fellow of the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA).

Peter Wilkinson Howitt is a Canadian economist. He is the Lyn Crost Professor of Social Sciences at Brown University. Howitt is a Fellow of the Econometric Society since 1994 and a Fellow of Royal Society of Canada since 1992. He served as president of the Canadian Economics Association in 1993–1994 and was the editor of the Journal of Money, Credit, and Banking in the period 1997–2000. For 2019 he received the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Economics.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jacques Mairesse (economist)</span> French economist

Jacques Mairesse is a French economist. He is the posthumous son of Jacques Mairesse (1905–1940), an international French association footballer.

Reinhilde Veugelers is a Belgian economist and Professor of Managerial Economics, Strategy and Innovation at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven from Belgium, known for her research on science and innovation. She is also a scholar at Bruegel in Brussels and at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington D.C.

William R. Kerr is the Dimitri V. D'Arbeloff – MBA Class of 1955 Professor of Business Administration professor at Harvard Business School, where he is a co-director of Harvard's Managing the Future of Work project and faculty chair of the Launching New Ventures program for executive education.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Rachel Griffith</span> British economist (born 1963)

Dame Rachel Susan Griffith is a British-American academic and educator. She is professor of economics at the University of Manchester and a research director at the Institute for Fiscal Studies.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">John F. Helliwell</span>

John F. Helliwell is a Canadian economist, professor emeritus of Economics at the University of British Columbia. senior fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) and co-director of the CIFAR Programme on Social Interactions, Identity, and Well-Being; Board Director of the International Positive Psychology Association, and editor of the World Happiness Report.

Stefana Pentcheva Stantcheva is a Bulgarian-born French economist who has served as the Nathaniel Ropes Professor of Political Economy at Harvard University since 2021. She has been a member of the Conseil d’Analyse Économique since 2018. In 2018, she was described by The Economist as one of the best young economists of the decade.

Yuriy Gorodnichenko is an economist and Quantedge Presidential professor at the University of California, Berkeley.

Kiminori Matsuyama is a Japanese economist. He is a professor of economics at Northwestern University and, since December 2018, the chief scientific adviser of the Tokyo Foundation for Policy Research. He is also international senior fellow at the Canon Institute of Global Studies. He was awarded the Nakahara Prize from the Japanese Economic Association in 1996 and was elected a fellow of the Econometric Society in 1999, and a fellow of the Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory in 2011.

Robert Christopher Feenstra is an American economist, academic and author. He is the C. Bryan Cameron Distinguished Chair in International Economics at University of California, Davis. He served as the director of the International Trade and Investment Program at the National Bureau of Economic Research from 1992 to 2016. He also served as Associate Dean in the Social Sciences at the University of California, Davis from 2014 to 2019.

Matthias Doepke is a German economist, currently Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics and Political Science and Gerald F. and Marjorie G. Fitzgerald Professor of Economic History at Northwestern University. His research focuses on economic growth, development, political economy and monetary economics.

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 “Ufuk Akcigit” uchicago.edu Retrieved 11 October 2021.
  2. 1 2 "Two US social scientists honoured with prestigious prize". www.mpg.de. Retrieved 2021-11-05.
  3. 1 2 "John Simon Guggenheim Foundation | Ufuk Akcigit" . Retrieved 2021-11-05.
  4. 1 2 3 "Global Economy Prize 2022 Awarded | Kiel Institute". ifw-kiel.de. Retrieved 2022-06-19.
  5. 1 2 3 "2022 Sakıp Sabancı Uluslararası Araştırma Ödülleri Sahiplerini Buldu | GazeteSU". sabanciuniv.edu. Retrieved 2022-12-07.
  6. Bir Hayat Hikayesi; Prof. Dr. Ufuk Akçiğit | Profil , retrieved 2021-11-05
  7. "Hakkında — Ufuk Akcigit Blog Yazilari". www.artnotlari.com (in Turkish). Retrieved 2021-11-05.
  8. 1 2 "Congratulations to our 2021 Fellows | The Econometric Society". www.econometricsociety.org. Retrieved 2021-11-05.
  9. 1 2 Research Agenda: Ufuk Akcigit on Innovation and Economic Growth. Society for Economic Dynamics. (2020, August 14). Retrieved October 11, 2021, from https://www.economicdynamics.org/newsletter-nov-2017/#unique-identifierUfuk
  10. Akcigit, Ufuk, Jeremy Pearce, and Marta Prato. Tapping into Talent: Coupling Education and Innovation Policies for Economic Growth. Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research, September 2020. doi : 10.3386/w27862
  11. "SI 2021 Inequality and the Macroeconomy". NBER. Retrieved 2021-11-05.
  12. Akcigit, Ufuk; Ates, Sina (April 2019). "Ten Facts on Declining Business Dynamism and Lessons from Endogenous Growth Theory" (PDF). Cambridge, MA: w25755. doi:10.3386/w25755.{{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  13. Akcigit, U. & Ates, S.T. (2019b). What Happened to U.S Business Dynamism? (Working Paper No. 25756).
  14. Carolina Villegas-Sánchez (2021). Rising Corporate Market Power : Emerging Policy Issues. Mr.Ippei Shibata, Mr.Daniel A Schwarz, Ms.Marina Mendes Tavares, Chiara Maggi, Jiayue Fan, Philipp Engler. ISBN   9781513512082. OCLC   1253005904.
  15. Aghion, Philippe; Akcigit, Ufuk; Bergeaud, Antonin; Blundell, Richard; Hémous, David (April 2015). "Innovation and Top Income Inequality" (PDF). Cambridge, MA: w21247. doi:10.3386/w21247.{{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  16. "Kauffman Foundation Announces 2014 Recipients of Junior Faculty Fellowship Grants". PRWeb. Retrieved 2021-11-05.
  17. "Akcigit and Bonhomme Receive Named Professorships | Kenneth C. Griffin Department of Economics | The University of Chicago". economics.uchicago.edu. Retrieved 2021-11-05.
  18. "Akcigit Awarded NSF CAREER Grant | Kenneth C. Griffin Department of Economics | The University of Chicago". economics.uchicago.edu. Retrieved 2021-11-05.
  19. "List of Previous Prize Winners". www.ifw-kiel.de. Retrieved 2021-11-05.