This year, the Society of Labor Economists presented Marianne Bertrand, a professor of economics at the University of Chicago, the Sherwin Rosen Award "for outstanding contributions in the field of labor in economics." A member of the Foundation's Behavioral Economics Roundtable, Bertrand's research has covered a a variety of topics, including racial discrimination, household finance, and the effects of regulation on employment.

The announcement of the award cited a number of Bertrand's highly cited papers, including one on CEO pay funded by the Foundation and co-authored with Sendhil Mullainathan:

One particular labor market where the connection between product market performance and compensation is particularly important is the market for corporate executives. Bertrand has written a number of highly influential papers on this topic. For instance, her Quarterly Journal of Economics (2001) paper with Mullainathan, "Are CEOs Rewarded for Luck? The Ones without Principals Are," empirically examines two competing views of CEO pay. The contracting view of CEO pay assumes that pay is used by shareholders to solve an agency problem. Simple models of the contracting view predict that pay should not be tied to luck, where luck is defined as observable shocks to performance beyond the CEO's control. Using several measures of luck, they find that CEO pay in fact responds as much to a lucky dollar as to a general dollar. A skimming model, where the CEO has captured the pay-setting process, is consistent with this fact.

Read more about Bertrand's research.