Yi (Daniel) Xu, professor of Economics, has been awarded the 2025 Robert E. Lucas Jr. Prize for the most interesting paper in the area of Dynamic Economics published in the Journal of Political Economy in the last two years.
The biannual Lucas Prize was established in 2016 to celebrate Lucas’s seminal contributions to economics and his Phoenix Prize award.
Xu, along with co-authors Chris Edmond (University of Melbourne) and Virgiliu Midrigan (New York University), have been awarded for “How Costly are Markups?” (Journal of Political Economy 131 [7]: 1619–1675), which studies the welfare costs of markups in a dynamic model with heterogeneous firms and endogenous markups.
The paper is a central contribution to literature in dynamic economics that helps clarify, decompose and measure the impact of market power on the economy.
Xu’s research primarily focuses on productivity, international trade and industrial organization. He has received numerous grants from the National Science Foundation, the Private Enterprise Development in Low-Income Countries and the NET Institute. His recent projects explore innovation, productivity, exporting and industry dynamics while focusing on emerging economies such as China, Colombia, Taiwan, Korea and Turkey.
Content adapted from The University of Chicago Press Journals.