Awards Menu

CEA Fellows

John Rae Prize

The John Rae Prize is awarded every second year to the Canadian economist with the best research record during the last five years. The Prize is intended to recognize research excellence in the recent past and is not a life-time award. The award has been named after John Rae, born in Scotland in 1796, who did most of his work in Canada and was a genuine precursor of endogenous growth theory.  The award comes with a cash prize of $5,000. 

Prize Criteria

The Prize is awarded to the Canadian economist with the best research record during the last five years. The Committee may decide what constitutes "best research record" and may also interpret "five years" with a modest amount of flexibility. Nominees must have a current, primary appointment in Canada and have done so in three of the last five years. Nominees must be members of the Association at the time of nomination. Current members of the Presidential Cycle of the CEA Board of Directors (Past President, President, Vice-President, Deputy Vice-President) are not eligible for award consideration. 

Nominations can be made here: nomination form. If you encounter any difficulties using this form, please send the necessary information (letter of nomination & candidate's c.v.) to the CEA office at office@economics.ca, and it will be forwarded to the committee.

The deadline for submissions is March 9, 2026

2026 Winner of the John Rae Prize:

Diego Restuccia (University of Toronto)

Professor Diego Restuccia from the University of Toronto is a renowned macroeconomist, investigating the intersection of economic growth, development, and productivity, with a particular emphasis on misallocation and structural transformation.

Professor Restuccia’s scholarly contributions have been recognized by major honours, including being elected as a Fellow of the Econometric Society in 2024 and the renewal of his Tier I Canada Research Chair in Macroeconomics and Productivity.

Since 2021 Professor Restuccia published twelve papers, including three in top-five general interest journals and others in leading macro journals. A very impressive global study published in 2022 at The Review of Economic Studies (with Adamopoulos) investigates the potential role of geography in accounting for agricultural productivity difference across counties. The paper very convincingly shows that low agricultural productivity is not due to unfavourable land endowment, focusing attention on heterogenous policies, institutions, constraints and frictions.

His 2022 Econometrica paper (with Adamopoulos, Brandt, and Leight) studies the consequences of misallocation of resources in the agricultural sector in China. The authors document, using very detailed micro-data, the consequences of within-village friction on misallocation of land and capital between farmers and the selection of workers into agriculture.

Finally, the work on “Land Security and Mobility Friction” published in 2024 at the Quarterly Journal of Economics (with Adamopoulos, Brandt, Chen and Wei) quantitatively disentangles the importance of insecure property rights from other labour-mobility frictions for the reallocation of labour and agricultural productivity in China. It demonstrates how reforms that improved land property rights have reduced labour-reallocation barriers and enhanced productivity.

As the agricultural sector is central to many developing economies these studies provide critical insights for their growth and productivity. Their placement underscores both the relevance of his research agenda and its influence across development, macroeconomics, and political economy.

Most of Professor Restuccia’s other publications during the past five years have appeared in the best field journals in macroeconomics including the Journal of Monetary Economics, American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, Journal of Political Economy: Macroeconomics.

Nominations: Closed

Nominations are open to all members but in practice the majority of nominations come from the Chairs of the Economics Departments in Canada. Nominators are asked to send a nomination letter and the CV of the nominee. Additional materials will not be submitted to the selection committee.  

For the 2024 award, nominations were to be submitted by Thursday April 4, 2024 by filling out the following form.  If you encounter any difficulties using this form, please send the necessary information (letter of nomination & candidate's c.v.) to office@economics.ca with "Rae Prize" in the subject line and it will be forwarded to the committee.   

Prize Committee 

The Committee is appointed by the President of the CEA in consultation with other members of the CEA Board.  Starting with the 2024 prize, the prize committee will consist of five members. 

Past Winners

2024 Robert Clark (Queen's University)

Remarks from the 2022 Prize Committee:

The Canadian Economic Association awards the John Rae Prize every two years to the Canadian Economist with the best research record over the past five years. The winner of the 2024 John Rae Prize: Professor Robert Clark from Queen’s University.

Dr. Clark holds the Stephen J.R. Smith Chair in Economic Policy and is a leading researcher in the field of industrial organization of the financial sector. Since 2019, Dr. Clark has published nine papers in highly ranked journals, including four published in the top-five journals in economics: one in the American Economic Review, two in the Journal of Political Economy, and one in the Review of Economic Studies; as well as one in the R&R stage at the American Economic Review. The remaining papers are published in the top ranked field journals in his area of expertise.

Dr. Clark is widely recognized as a leading researcher in the field of industrial organization with a particular focus on antitrust and regulation in the banking and financial sectors. His research has developed new empirical methodologies to analyse such topics as: auction processes to resolve bank failures; market power in mortgage markets; and collusion in the gasoline and grocery industries.

Recognition of Dr. Clark’s impact is reflected in his invited chapter for the Handbook of Industrial Organization. His paper “Resolving failed banks: Uncertainty, multiple bidding and auction design,” forthcoming in the Review of Economic Studies, was recognized by the International Industrial Organization Society with the 2020 award for the best paper in Regulatory Economics. Dr. Clark’s pioneering work in the field was also recognized with the 2022-2027 Bank of Canada Fellowship Award.

Congratulations to Dr. Robert Clark for winning the 2024 John Rae Prize.

2022 Krishna Pendakur (Simon Fraser University)
 

Remarks from the 2022 Prize Committee:

The Canadian Economic association awards the John Rae Prize every 2 years to the Canadian Economist with the best research record over the past five years. This year the price committee consisted of Siwan Anderson, Arthur Robson, Stephen Williamson and Fabian Lange (chair). We very quickly agreed unanimously on the winner of this years John Rae Prize: Krishna Pendakur.

As he puts it on his webpage, the theme that motivates Krishna's research is the goal to “make life better for poor people by better documenting the trials they face in economic life.” Among the challenges in documenting – or measuring – individual welfare and consumption is to account for the social frameworks within which goods are consumed. At its most basic, this means accounting for the distribution of consumption within the household. During the last 5 years, Krishna has published (or forthcoming) papers on consumption and welfare in the household in the Journal of Political Economy (2x), the Journal of Econometrics, the Economic Journal, the Journal of Business and Economic Statistics, Quantitative Economics, and the Canadian Journal of Economics. These contributions have a distinct methodological flavour to them and are already influencing how economists think about modeling and measuring consumption and welfare in the household.

In addition to these influential methodological papers, Krishna has also worked and published on directly policy relevant issues such as the Canada Child Benefit, governance and income inequality in indigenous communities, and on the disease burden and policy responses related to mental health and substance abuse. The latter research strand includes historical work on the federal alcohol prohibition in the US.

Without a doubt, Krishna Pendakur has produced an outstanding research record centered on an impressive set of methodological papers. He has not lost sight of opportunities to speak directly to policy relevant, substantive issues. Congratulations to Krishna Pendakur, Professor of Economics at Simon Fraser University, for winning the 2022 John Rae Prize. 

2020 Yoram Halevy (University of Toronto)

Remarks from the 2020 Prize Committee

Yoram Halevy of the University of Toronto has a stellar research record investigating deviations from standard rationality. His work is exemplary in mapping rigorous theoretical foundations to implications for both experimental and observational data. Over the last five years, Halevy has accumulated an impressive publication record, with papers published in Econometrica, Experimental Economics, Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, Journal of Political Economy, Quantitative Economics, the Review of Economic Studies, and the American Economic Review: Insights. The actual quality of these papers matches the prestigious nature of these outlets.

The paper in Econometrica is very well-known as it applies the novel insight that some of the apparent inter-temporal choice reversals observed in experiments can actually be attributed to time varying preferences. This involves carefully defining the relevant concepts and clever illuminating experiments. The JPE paper is an important re-examination of an old question relating to the connection between data and utility functions. The authors decompose the disagreement between any particular parametric utility function and the data into a component that is disagreement between the data and any over-parameterized utility function, and a component that has to do with the specified parametric class. This approach utilizes the intuitively appealing money metric construction due to Varian. They show their decomposition has desirable empirical properties. The RES paper has a simple appealing core idea. What if you have ambiguity aversion to correlation between two urns? In addition to ambiguity aversion to the distribution within each urn? The authors show this effect can be identified in ingenious experiments and investigate the theoretical basis.

This research represents a coherent, energetic and insightful program of exploration of bounded rationality that has attracted international attention. Halevy richly deserves the John Rae Prize for 2020 from the Canadian Economics  Association for the best publication record by a Canadian economist in the last five years.

2018  Siwan Anderson (University of British Columbia)

2016  Fabian Lange (McGill University)

2014  Arthur Robson (Simon Fraser University) and Francesco Trebbi (University of British Columbia)

2012  Yves Sprumont (Université de Montréal)

2010  Michael Devereux (University of British Columbia)

2008  Paul Beaudry (University of British Columbia)

2006  Hao Li (University of Toronto)

2004  Walter Bossert (Université de Montréal)

2002  Mike Peters (University of Toronto)

2000  Dan Trefler (University of Toronto) and Shouyong Shi (Queen's University)

1998  Thomas Lemieux (Université de Montréal)

1996  Martin Browning (McMaster University)

1994  Jean-Marie Dufour (Université de Montréal) and Larry Epstein (University of Toronto)