Xavier Gabaix

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Xavier Gabaix (* August 1971 ) is a French economist and university professor who holds the Martin J. Gruber Professorship in Finance at New York University . In 2011, Gabaix received the Prix ​​du meilleur jeune économiste de France - the French equivalent of the John Bates Clark Medal - from the French newspaper Le Monde and the Cercle des économistes . In the same year he also received the Fischer Black Prize from the American Finance Association . In 2008, The Economist named him one of eight top young economists , particularly highlighting his work in the field of behavioral economics .

education

From 1991 to 1995 studied Xavier Gabaix at the Grande Ecole Ecole Normale Supérieure (ENS) Mathematics , received by ENS a BA and passed the Agrégation . He then moved to Harvard University in 1995 , where he received his doctorate in 1999 under the supervision of Robert Barro , Donald Ray Davis , John Y. Campbell and Edward Glaeser .

Professional background

After Gabaix received his Ph.D. He accepted a position as Assistant Professor of Economics at the Department of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he was promoted to Rudi Dornbusch Career Development Assistant Professor in 2003 and Rudi Dornbusch Career Development Associate Professor in 2004. In 2007 Gabaix then moved to the Stern School of Business at New York University (NYU) as Associate Professor of Finance , where he was promoted to full professor in 2009 and was given the Martin J. Gruber Professorship in Finance in 2010. In parallel, Gabaix was visiting professor at the University of Chicago (1999–2000), New York University (2001, 2002) and Princeton University (2006–2007).

From 2002 to 2010, Xavier Gabaix worked for the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) as a Research Fellow on the subjects of Asset Pricing, Corporate Finance and Economic Fluctuations and Growth before being promoted to Faculty Research Associate in 2010. Furthermore, Gabaix has been a Research Fellow of the Council for Economic Policy Research since 2009, a member of the Conseil d'analysis économique since 2010 and Research Associate of the European Corporate Governance Initiative since 2011 .

In addition, Gabaix works as an editor for the economic journals Econometrica , Critical Finance Review , Mathematics and Financial Economics and Management Science .

research

According to the economic publications database IDEAS , Gabaix is ​​one of the 2% of the most research-intensive economists in the overall ranking (458th place). Also under criteria such as "number of citations" or "number of papers" Gabaix clearly belongs to the top 5% of the economists recorded in the database. Gabaix's most cited article is titled Zipf's Law for Cities: An Explanation (1999). In this article, Gabaix examines Zipf's law , an empirical rule regarding city population growth, and explains why Zipf's law is a special case of Gibrat's law.

Gabaix's main research contributions, the academic importance of which is reflected by their citation in the specialist literature, also include the following:

In 2006, Gabaix and Laibson investigated the concealment of product information from consumers by companies in connection with necessary add-ons (e.g. printer cartridges), which can take place when consumers are "short-sighted". This concealment creates an inefficiency that consumer education may encourage other businesses to remove. However, if the add-ons have quasi-perfect substitutes, it is impossible for the competing companies to take away their prejudices about the add-ons from the consumers in a profitable way. Therefore, there are two forms of exploitation in equilibrium: Optimizing companies exploit short-sighted consumers through marketing that conceals expensive add-ons, while sophisticated consumers take advantage of these marketing activities. It is not possible to end this exploitation by nifty consumers, nor is it possible to lure myopic and nifty consumers to non-exploitative companies. Gabaix and Laibson show that informational concealment can exist even in perfectly competitive markets, markets with free advertising, and in situations where the concealment causes allocation inefficiencies.

In an article published in 2008, Gabaix and Larnier investigate why CEO pay has risen so sharply in recent years. To do this, they develop an equilibrium model, which shows that the aggregate company size and the size of the company determine the amount of the CEO's salary. Thus, they explain the rapid and disproportionate growth in CEO salaries in the last few decades primarily through strong growth in the average company size. In this sense, they tie in with the extreme value theory and the scientific literature on the evaluation of superstars by Sherwin Rosen .

Honors

bibliography

Article (selection)

  • Gabaix, Xavier (1999): Zipf's Law for Cities: An Explanation , in: The Quarterly Review of Economics , Vol. 114, No. 3, pp. 739-767.
  • Gabaix, Xavier, David Laibson (2006): Shrouded Attributes, Consumer Myopia, and Information Suppression in Competitive Markets, in: The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol. 121, No. 2, pp. 505-540.
  • Gabaix, Xavier, Augustin Landier (2008): Why Has CEO Pay Increased So Much? , in: The Quarterly Review of Economics, Vol. 123, No. 1, pp. 49-100.
  • Gabaix, Xavier (2011): The Granular Origins of Aggregate Fluctuations , in: Econometrica, Vol. 79, No. 3, pp. 733-772.
  • Gabaix, Xavier, Yannis M. Ioannides (2004): The evolution of city size distributions , in: JV Henderson & JF Thisse (eds.), Handbook of Regional and Urban Economics , 1st Edition, Volume 4, Chapter 53, pp. 2341-2378, Elsevier.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Press release of the award ceremony in Le Monde on May 24, 2011 (French)
  2. ↑ a b Fischer Black Prize ( Memento from May 2, 2013 in the web archive archive.today )
  3. ^ Emerging economists: International young bright things , in: The Economist, December 30, 2008.
  4. ↑ Overall ranking of the economic database IDEAS (English)
  5. ↑ Author profile of Xavier Gabaix on IDEAS (English)
  6. ↑ Article profile of Zipf's Law for Cities: An Explanation on IDEAS ( Memento from January 29, 2013 in the Internet Archive )
  7. ↑ Quotes from articles and working papers by Xavier Gabaix on IDEAS (English)
  8. ↑ Article profile of Shrouded Attributes, Consumer Myopia, and Information Suppression in Competitive Markets on IDEAS (English)
  9. ↑ Article Profile of Why Has CEO Pay Increased So Much? on IDEAS (English)
  10. ^ Prix ​​du meilleur jeune économiste 2011. lecercledeseconomistes.fr, May 24, 2011, accessed on December 9, 2015 (French).
personal data
SURNAME Gabaix, Xavier
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French economist and university lecturer
DATE OF BIRTH August 1971