Distinguished Service Award

Professor and Chair of Economics Christopher “Kit” Baum was selected for the American Economic Association Distinguished Service Award, which salutes the volunteer efforts of individuals whose service to the profession has impacted the field of economics in a significant and positive way on a national scale.

Baum, who received the award at the AEA annual meeting in San Antonio, was chosen for his multi-decade volunteering effort to promote open-source repositories, transparency, and reproducibility within the profession. In 1997, the AEA noted, Baum established the Statistical Software Components (SSC) archive and has continued to be its custodian. SSC is a repository containing user-written software for statistical analysis. SSC has made it possible for software users to easily access programming packages, such as data management utilities, estimation routines, as well as post-estimation and output processing routines.

“The number of programming packages on SSC now stands at more than 3,000, with a per-month average of over 300 hits per package,” the association stated in its announcement. “Kit’s setting up and maintaining of SSC have made and continue to make a massive contribution to the empirical research community worldwide and have helped democratize access to methods at the frontier of econometrics.”

The AEA is a non-profit, non-partisan, scholarly association dedicated to the discussion and publication of economics research. Its more than 20,000 members come from academe, business, government, and consulting groups within diverse disciplines from multicultural backgrounds.