The Shiskin Award
The annual Julius Shiskin Award for Economic Statistics was established in 1979 by the Washington Statistical Society and is now co-sponsored by the National Association for Business Economics. It is given in recognition of unusually original and important contributions in the development of economic statistics or in the use of economic statistics in interpreting the economy.Previous Award Winners.
Arthur Kennickell to Receive the 2007 Julius Shiskin Award
Arthur B. Kennickell, Senior Economist and Head of the Microeconomic Surveys Unit at the Federal Reserve Board, will receive the 2007 Julius Shiskin Memorial Award for Economic Statistics. The award recognizes Dr. Kennickell for his leadership of the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances and his achievements as an international expert on the design and implementation of household economic surveys. Through his efforts, the Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) has become the world’s pre-eminent wealth survey. Dr. Kennickell becomes the 33rd person to be honored with this award, which is given for outstanding innovation in economic statistics research and applications. He will be honored at separate events this year hosted by the three organizations sponsoring the award: the Washington Statistical Society at its annual dinner on June __ and the Business and Economics Section of the American Statistical Association and the National Association for Business Economics at their annual meetings later this year.
Dr. Kennickell manages the SCF, a triennial survey of U.S. households sponsored by the Federal Reserve Board. The SCF is designed to provide detailed information on households’ balance sheets and their use of financial services, as well as on their incomes, pensions, labor force participation, and demographic characteristics. The need to measure financial characteristics for all households imposes special requirements on the sample design for the survey. The survey is expected to provide reliable information both on attributes that are broadly distributed across the population—such as home ownership—and on those that are highly concentrated in a relatively small part of the population—for example, ownership of closely held businesses. To address this requirement, the SCF employs a dual-frame sample design consisting of both a standard, geographically based random sample and a special over-sample of relatively wealthy families. Dr. Kennickell has made significant contributions to the theoretical basis and the methodology for the implementation of such a complex survey design.
In addition to managing the SCF, Dr. Kennickell has contributed significantly to the professional statistics literature on such methodological topics as sample design, nonresponse effects, weighting design, techniques for imputations for missing observations, disclosure security, and data quality. He has also written insightful articles about the nature of the SCF data, as well as articles that have interpreted the economic meaning of the survey results. These articles have substantially enhanced the understanding of policymakers, professional statisticians, economists and the general public. As a consequence, the SCF is the authoritative source of information on the ownership and distribution characteristics of U.S. household wealth, and the standard of quality against which household surveys around the world are compared.
In recognition of his achievements and extraordinary expertise, Dr. Kennickell has advised government and non-governmental organizations, both in the United States and abroad, on the design and implementation of household surveys. In recent years he has played an active international role, serving as a member of the steering committee of the Luxembourg Wealth Study since 2004, and as an advisor to the European Central Bank since 2006. Dr. Kennickell was elected a fellow of the American Statistical Association in 1998, served as the member of the Federal Committee on Statistical Methodology since 2002 and as a member of the board of the National Bureau of Economic Research since 2004. He also has been a member of the editorial board of the Review of Income and Wealth since 1994.
Previous Shiskin Award Winners
2006 - J. Steven (Steve) Landefeld, Director of the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) of the U.S. Department of Commerce, for his leadership in strengthening the BEA economic accounts, enhancing the international reputation of BEA, and outstanding staff development.
2005 - W. Erwin Diewert, Professor of Economics at the University of British Columbia, for path-breaking economic theoretical innovations, notably in index number theory, adapted to improve national economic statistics around the world
2004 - Agustín Maravall, Bank of Spain, for outstanding leadership and contributions to methods, software, training, and consultation for model-based seasonal adjustment and its acceptance by national statistical offices and central banks.
2003 - Carol A. Corrado, Federal Reserve Board, for outstanding stewardship of industrial production and capacity measurement resulting in notable statistical improvements, for leadership in measuring productivity and information-technology output and prices, and for significant contributions to macroeconomic analysis using disaggregated data.
2003 - Susan E. Offutt, Economic Research Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, for exceptional leadership in establishing the primacy of the Economic Research Service as the Nation's leading source of economic information and policy analysis on food, farm, natural resource, and rural development issues.
2002 - Katharine G. Abraham, Bureau of Labor Statistics, for her many methodological improvements in U.S. price and employment statistics—improvements demanded by the increasingly complex roles those statistics play in business and government affairs.
2001 - George C. Tiao, University of Chicago, for his research and leadership contributions to the methodological foundations of the first model-based approach to seasonal adjustment, an approach that has been adopted by several national statistical offices and central banks.
2000 - Edwin R. Dean, Bureau of Labor Statistics,for his important contributions to the improvement and understanding of productivity measures, his leadership in international comparisons of labor statistics, and his expertise and innovation that has expanded the Bureau of Labor Statistics international technical cooperation program.
1999 - Robert P. Parker, Bureau of Economic Analysis,for important contributions to aid in the management and interpretation of the economy, for exceptionally sound and innovative research in economic statistics, and for decades of work in improving the National Income and Product Accounts in the United States and other countries.
1998 - Eva Jacobs, Bureau of Labor Statistics, for her management of the Consumer Expenditure Survey Program, her work on the use of the Consumer Expenditure Survey data to analyze and interpret the economy, and her responsiveness to customer needs.
1998 - Joseph L. Gastwirth, George Washington University,for his seminal work that clarified the statistical procedures for the Lorenz curve and related measures of income inequality and for his continuing contributions to statistical methodology needed for economic and labor analysis.
1997 - Jack E. Triplett, Bureau of Economic Analysis, for broad contributions to the field of economic measurement, including the development and introduction of hedonic price index measurement techniques and superlative price and quantity indices in the National Income and Product Accounts and, most recently, the development and implementation of the North American Industry Classification System.
1996 - David F. Findley, the U.S. Census Bureau,for outstanding scientific leadership in improving seasonal adjustment methodology for the economic times series at the Census Bureau, the Federal Government, and throughout the world.
1995 - Fritz Scheuren, Internal Revenue Service, Statistics of Income,for breaking new ground in the construction of micro economic files, as well as the statistical uses of administrative data for economic research.
1994 - Joel Popkin, Joel Popkin and Company,for his contributions to the field of economic statistics, especially in the development of price indexes and other gauges of inflationary pressures.
1994 - Richard D. Allen, National Agricultural Statistics Service,for his contributions to the application of statistics to agricultural economics and to improving the quality, integrity, and timeliness of agricultural statistics.
1993 - Barbara A. Bailar, American Statistical Association,for her contributions to modernizing the Census Bureau's statistical programs, especially her work in undercount and non-sampling errors in the Decennial Census.
1992 - Allan H. Young, Bureau of Economic Analysis,for leadership in forging and refining statistical tools that contribute substantially to the ability to analyze the United States' economy and for imaginative management of a major statistical agency through critical times.
1991 - Carol S. Carson, Bureau of Economic Analysis,for her leadership in developing and refining the economic statistical base of the U.S. and for her contributions to the development of the revised U.N. System of National Accounts.
1991 - Stephen P. Taylor, Federal Reserve Board,for his outstanding leadership in developing and maintaining the U.S. Flow of Funds Accounts and using them to interpret the behavior of financial markets.
1990 - Jerome A. Mark, Bureau of Labor Statistics, for his outstanding achievements in the development and publications of measures of multi factor productivity.
1989 - Frank deLeeuw, Bureau of Economic Analysis,for his wide range of contributions to economic statistics that were characterized by the efficient use of statistical techniques and a practical analytical focus.
1988 - Charles Waite, Bureau of Economic Analysis and U. S. Census Bureau, for his contributions to the Bureau of Economic Analysis and the U. S. Census Bureau,
1988 - Roger Herriot, U.S. Census Bureau, for his work in improving income statistics in the United States.
1987 - Irving Kravis, University of Pennsylvania, for his work in comparative studies for national income and prices.
1986 - Janet Norwood, Bureau of Labor Statistics, for her direction of the statistical program at the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
1985 - David A. Pierce, Federal Reserve Board, for his introduction and use of modern statistical techniques in the data collection and modeling program of the Federal Reserve Board.
1984 - Geoffrey Moore, Bureau of Labor Statistics and Columbia University, for his research in measurement and analysis of business cycles.
1983 - Beatrice Vaccara, Treasury and Bureau of Industrial Analysisfor her major contributions to economic statistics including the development and application of input/output modeling and improvements to the system of business cycle indicators and for her leadership and direction of practical, policy oriented economic analysis.
1982 - Edward Denison, Bureau of Economic Analysis and the Brookings Institute, for his innovative and significant contributions to economics in general and particularly in the use of economic statistics.
1981 - James Bonnen, Michigan State University,for his service to the Statistical Community as Executive Director of the Presidential Reorganization Project for the Federal Statistical System and for his report Federal Statistical System Project: Issues and Opinions.
1980 - Estella Dagum, Statistics Canada, for her outstanding achievement in economic statistics, particularly for widely recognized contributions in time series analysis and for extending Julius Shiskin's pioneering work in seasonal adjustment by combining the X-11 seasonal adjustment program with the Box-Jenkins ARIMA models and especially the development of the X-11-ARIMA method.