Presidential Young Investigator Award: Empirical Studies in Industrial Economics

该奖项根据国家科学基金会的总统青年研究人员奖计划向Frank Wolak博士提供支持。该计划的目标是为国家最杰出和最有前途的年轻科学和工程教师提供研究支持。这些奖项旨在提高美国学术机构应对学术和工业研究和教学对高素质科学和工程人才的需求的能力。这一奖项将允许研究人员在理论计量经济学和产业组织领域继续他的研究。他的所有研究都是出于将经济理论与经验数据联系起来的愿望。虽然他的方法论工作的作用是为实现他的实证工作的目标提供更好的计量经济学技术，但他的实证工作的目标是推导和估计基于经济理论的计量经济模型，然后检验这些模型所体现的经济理论的有效性。正是以这种协同的方式，Wolak博士打算将模拟公司和行业行为的创新理论工作与全球半导体市场的经验现实、公用事业监管以及美国电力公司煤炭采购所揭示的公司之间的空间竞争性质相结合。在他对全球半导体市场的分析中，将特别强调评估日本对这一市场的渗透率增加对世界和美国市场稳定的影响。沃拉克博士对涉及不平等限制的问题进行了严格的假设检验，并对企业互动的博弈论模型进行了实证实施，这证明了他将一套不同寻常的重要技能应用于弥合理论与实践之间的差距的方式。沃拉克博士的工作已经并将继续非常有效地在经济理论和经验数据之间实现更严格的匹配，因为他动态地利用理论为数据收集提供信息，并利用数据为理论的发展提供信息。

This award provides support to Dr. Frank Wolak under the National Science Foundation's Presidential Young Investigator Awards Program. The objective of this program is to provide research support to the Nation's most outstanding and promising young science and engineering faculty. The awards are intended to improve the capability of U.S. academic institutions to respond to the demand for highly qualified science and engineering personnel for academic and industrial research and teaching. This award will allow the investigator to pursue his research in the areas of theoretical econometrics and industrial organization. All of his research is motivated by the desire to link economic theory to empirical data. While the role of his methodological work is to provide better econometric techniques for accomplishing the goal of his empirical work, the goal of his empirical work is to derive and estimate econometric models based on economic theory and then to test the validity of the economic theory embodied in these models. It is in this synergistic fashion that Dr. Wolak intends to focus on integrating the innovative theoretical work modeling firm and industry behavior with the empirical realities of the global semiconductor market, public utility regulation, and the nature of spatial competition among firms as revealed in the context of U. S. electric utility coal purchases. In his analysis of the global semiconductor market, special emphasis will be given to assessing the impact of the increased Japanese penetration into this market on the stability of the world and U. S. markets. Dr. Wolak's subjection of problems involving inequality restrictions to rigorous hypothesis testing and his empirical implementation of game-theoretic models of firm interaction exemplify the way in which he brings his unusual set of important skills to bear on bridging the gap between theory and practice. Dr. Wolak's work has been and will continue to be very effective in achieving a more rigorous fit between economic theory and empirical data as he dynamically draws upon theory to inform data collection and data to inform the development of theory.