(Photo by Peter Julian)

Distinguished Service Award

The American Economic Association honors Economics' Kit Baum

Professor and Chair of Economics Christopher ā€œKitā€ Baum was selected for the American Economic Association Distinguished Service Award, which salutes the volunteer efforts of individuals whose service to the profession has impacted the field of economics in a significant and positive way on a national scale.

Baum, who received the award at the AEA annual meeting in San Antonio, was chosen for his multi-decade volunteering effort to promote open-source repositories, transparency, and reproducibility within the profession. In 1997, the AEA noted, Baum established the Statistical Software Components (SSC) archive and has continued to be its custodian. SSC is a repository containing user-written software for statistical analysis. SSC has made it possible for software users to easily access programming packages, such as data management utilities, estimation routines, as well as post-estimation and output processing routines.

ā€œThe number of programming packages on SSC now stands at more than 3,000, with a per-month average of over 300 hits per package,ā€ the association stated in its announcement. ā€œKit’s setting up and maintaining of SSC have made and continue to make a massive contribution to the empirical research community worldwide and have helped democratize access to methods at the frontier of econometrics.ā€

The AEA is a non-profit, non-partisan, scholarly association dedicated to the discussion and publication of economics research. Its more than 20,000 members come from academe, business, government, and consulting groups within diverse disciplines from multicultural backgrounds.