The Elinor Ostrom Lifetime Achievement Award
The Elinor Ostrom Lifetime Achievement Award is given every other year for sustained significant academic contributions to the field. This year’s winner was Gérard Roland, the E. Morris Cox Professor of Economics and Professor of Political Science, UC Berkeley.
Roland has published more than 80 peer-reviewed articles across Economics and Political Science, authored eleven books, and written many policy pieces. His work addresses institutions, culture, development, and institutional change. He is among the most cited researchers on political institutions and has advised individuals who have taken on roles in academia. His research has examined the determinants and effects of political institutions and their transformations, engaging with topics addressed by scholars such as Ostrom, North, Coase, Williamson, Greif, and Weingast.
His publications include analyses of socialist systems in the late 1980s and early 1990s, addressing planning challenges influenced by Janos Kornai and incentive theory. In the 1990s, he researched economic reforms under political constraints, collaborating with Matthias Dewatripont on gradualism. He further explored soft budget constraints in banking reforms and privatization, working with Patrick Bolton and Thierry Verdier. His research often considers legitimacy and political support for reforms, engaging with debates about shock therapy. With Torsten Persson and Guido Tabellini, he contributed to research on strategic issues in political economy.
Gérard’s comparative perspective led him to study China's economic reforms with Yingyi Qian and Chenggang Xu, examining administrative structures in governments and firms. This work analyzes how organizational forms impact nations and enterprises—a subject that remains active at the intersection of organizational economics and political science.
He has also studied institutional transplants in contexts such as Iraq and Afghanistan and developed the concept of "culture as slow-moving institutions," exploring the relationship between rapidly changing legal or political frameworks and more gradually evolving cultural elements. Collaboration with Yuriy Gorodnichenko focused on cultural change as a factor influencing reform outcomes.
Roland’s book on Transition Economics, cited widely, synthesizes themes such as the breakup of nations within a coherent framework. He later applied institutional analysis to the European Union and its democratic institutions. Additional research includes entrepreneurship and the cultural foundations of institutions, leading to several well-cited publications. His book on Development Economics (Pearson) is notable for incorporating the role of institutions into undergraduate instruction on development and growth.
Roland has mentored more than 30 PhD students who now hold academic posts globally, including Chris Blattman (Harris School, Chicago), Micael Castanheira (Université Libre de Bruxelles), Jan Fidrmuc (U Lille), Ethan Kaplan (University of Maryland), and Suresh Naidu (Columbia University). His mentoring has been crucial for many of us. His support and advice has been outstanding for the community.
The Ronald H. Coase Dissertation Award
Elisa Wirsching, for her dissertation, “Essays on the Politics of Local Bureaucracy,” award by New York University’s Department on Politics in 2024
Elisa’s dissertation addresses the politics of local bureaucracies. These local bureaucrats are the teachers, police officers, social workers, and administrators who shape citizens’ daily experiences with government. Elisa’s work demonstrates why we must take these actors seriously as political players in their own right.
The dissertation makes three main contributions.
- In her first essay, Elisa shows how bureaucrats can strategically manipulate service provision to exert political pressure. Using data on millions of 911 calls, she finds that after the New York City Council voted to cut the police budget, NYPD officers slowed response times disproportionately in the districts of council members who supported the cuts.
- Her second essay develops a formal model to analyze when and why bureaucratic sabotage occurs. She shows that such sabotage can create both “under-reform” and “over-reform,” as politicians anticipate how voters will interpret disruptions in service delivery.
- Finally, Elisa turns to the question of who becomes a bureaucrat. Drawing on a dataset of over 200,000 New York City employees, including more than 58,000 police officers, she documents racial and political affiliation differences in hiring, promotion, and retention. She also shows how events such as the murder of George Floyd reshaped the composition of the NYPD.
The committee greatly appreciated Elisa’s decision to focus on local bureaucracies, which despite their direct impact on citizens’ daily lives, have often been overlooked in scholarship. The committee also appreciated the sophistication of the analysis of bureaucratic influence. Rather than treating bureaucrats as passive implementers, Elisa shows how their choices and discretion can actively shape political outcomes, policy reforms, and even electoral dynamics. Finally, the committee was impressed by the way in which the dissertation combined theory and empirical analysis providing a foundation for future work on these topics.
The committee would also like to recognize two dissertations that received honorable mentions.
Carlo Medici’s dissertation from Northwestern University, examines how immigration and political connections shape labor markets, and provided an exceptionally well executed study on the impact of mass immigration to the US on organized labor.
Our second honorable mention is the dissertation of Jino Lu, with a dissertation from the University of Southern California. This dissertation explores how technological advances in one domain can impact innovation in others, highlighting the important interactions of firms, markets and law for innovation policy.
Committee: Talia Gillis (chair), Virginia Minni, Jared Rubin, Roya Talibova.
The Oliver E. Williamson Best Conference Paper Award:
Johannes Hoelzemann, Gustavo Manso, Abhishek Nagaraj and Matteo Tranchero, “The Streetlight Effect in Data-Driven Exploration”
This study addresses a fundamental question in the economics of innovation: whether the limited collective exploration observed in scientific research stems from inherent constraints on innovation or from organizational failures in incentive structures. The authors examine how prior data influences subsequent research trajectories, demonstrating both theoretically and empirically that access to information can paradoxically constrain exploration. Their framework reveals that when decision-makers possess information about medium-value opportunities, they may forgo the exploration of potentially superior alternatives, as the known medium-value option appears more attractive than uncertain high-risk, high-reward projects. This "streetlight effect" creates conditions under which more data reduces both individual and collective welfare relative to scenarios with less information or information about lower-value alternatives.
The empirical validation employs multiple methodologies: a laboratory experiment, instrumental variable estimation, and an event study of genetic discoveries from 1980 to 2019. The laboratory findings indicate that information about medium-value projects reduces the probability of identifying optimal outcomes by over fifty percent. In the genetic research analysis, the authors exploit variation in research costs between genes shared with mice and those that are not, finding that medium-value genetic discoveries delay scientific breakthroughs by an average of 2.8 years and significantly reduce exploration of novel targets. These findings have substantial implications for research institutions, funding agencies, and policymakers, particularly as organizations increasingly integrate artificial intelligence—which relies fundamentally on historical data—into decision-making processes. This work makes important contributions to organizational economics by illuminating how information structures affect collective exploration, coordination, and the provision of public goods in scientific research.
Committee: Barton Lee, Sara Lowes, Daniela Scur (chair), and Shaoda Wang