The American Economic Association awarded Gabriel Zucman the 2023 John Bates Clark Medal. This medal is awarded annually to an economist under the age of 40, for their outstanding research accomplishments. It is second in prestige only to the Nobel Prize in economics.
Widely regarded as one of the foremost experts on tax evasion, Gabriel Zucman’s innovative work has improved our understanding of the extent of tax evasion and tax avoidance, and of its impact on the low- and middle-classes. His research, based on the use of new databases, has contributed to shed light on the rise of income and wealth inequality, and provides key insights on the design of tax systems around the world.
In the announcement, the American Economic Association Honors and Awards Committee states that their decision was motivated by Zucman’s ground-breaking and influential research: “Through his entrepreneurial and creative pursuit of new data and methods for economic measurement, Gabriel Zucman has uncovered a range of fundamentally important facts quantifying the importance of tax evasion and measuring the rise of top income and wealth inequality. The 2023 John Bates Clark Medal is therefore awarded to Gabriel Zucman in recognition of these impressive achievements”.
Honored by the medal, Zucman insists that these achievements were made possible thanks to the collaboration of colleagues and mentors: “It is fantastic to see the American Economic Association recognize this body of work on tax evasion, tax avoidance, and the rise of economic inequality. I’m grateful for the colleagues, the students, the co-authors and the mentors who have worked with me over the years — research is really a collaborative process, and none of this research would have been possible without them”.
The EU Tax Observatory extends a warm congratulations to their director on this richly-deserved honor.
Gabriel Zucman is professor of economics at the Paris School of Economics and Ecole Normale Supérieure – PSL, associate professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley, director of the EU Tax Observatory, and director of the James M. and Cathleen D. Stone Center on Wealth and Income Inequality at UC Berkeley. He is the author of articles published in peer-reviewed journals such as the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the American Economic Review, the Journal of Public Economics, and of two books, The Hidden Wealth of Nations and The Triumph of Injustice. His research focuses on the accumulation, distribution, and taxation of global wealth and has renewed the analysis of the macro-distributional implications of globalization.