Yes, this is going to all be about me! 🙂
So, before getting to me, me, me, let me congratulate Emi Nakamura of the UC-Berkeley economics dept for receiving the John Bates Clark Award. It seems to be well deserved for her innovative and influential work on looking at high frequency detailed micro data sets to get more accurate estimates of macro variables, including both inflation rates and fiscal multipliers. At 38 she is young enough (one must be under 40). She is also now a coeditor of the American Economic Review. I have seen some grumbling that her frequent coauthor and husband, Jon Steinnson, did not share in it or get it himself. He is now too old at 42, and while her three most cited papers are coauthored with him, many others of hers are not, and several important papers of hers are sole authored.
As for how this relates to me, the really important part of this post, :-), I have never met her. However, I know her mother, Alice Orcutt Nakamura, an economist at the University of Alberta, who just happens to be the first woman ever to publish in the American Economic Review back in 1979. She was also the first woman president of the Canadian Economics Association in 1994-95. She has done lots of work on econmetrics, labor markets, and, interestingly, in the sort of micro studies of price changes that have since become a major focus of her daughter’s highly influential research.