Press Releases Chicago Booth’s Zingales shares 2018 Hicks-Tinbergen Award

The European Economic Association (EEA) has named Luigi Zingales, professor of finance and entrepreneurism at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, winner of the 2018 Hicks-Tinbergen Award.

Zingales, along with Paola Sapienza of Northwestern University Kellogg School of Management, and Luigi Guiso of the Einaudi Institute for Economics and Finance, received the award for their paper “Long-term Persistence,” published in the Journal of European Economics Association (JEEA).

One of the first studies to establish a link between specific historical modes of governance and current “civic capital,” such as trust, the paper compares several different measures of civic capital across different Italian towns today and links them to measures of self-governance in the Middle Ages. One of the paper’s primary findings is that the higher degree of self-governance that was present several hundred years ago likely causes a high level of civic capital today. Additionally, the paper argues that one of the forces behind this persistence is how the degree of self-governance shaped the attitudes and preferences of the citizens, as measured in surveys of “self-efficacy.”

Established in 1991 and awarded every two years, the Hicks-Tinbergen Award recognizes authors of an outstanding paper published in the JEEA.  The award will be presented in August in Cologne, Germany during the annual EEA conference.