2017 Recipient: Jonathan Pritchett
Mr. Lawrence M. v. D. Schloss, 1976 cum laude graduate from Tulane University and member of its executive committee, has endowed the Lawrence M. v. D. Schloss Prize for Excellence in Economics. “The Schloss Prize is to be offered to outstanding full professors, associate professors, or assistant professors, or graduate or undergraduate students, who do outstanding work in the Department of Economics.”
Mr. Schloss has had a distinguished career in the financial services industry. Following his 1976 graduation from Tulane, he earned an MBA from The Wharton School of The University of Pennsylvania in 1978. He then joined Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette (DLJ) in 1978 as an investment banker, and during his 22 years at DLJ rose to become Chairman of DLJ's Merchant Banking Division. Upon the acquisition of DLJ by Credit Suisse in 2000, he became the Global Head of CSFB Private Equity, its $32 billion alternative asset investment management business. In 2004, he founded and became Chairman and Chief Executive Office of Diamond Castle Holdings, a private equity firm. In 2010 he was appointed New York City's Deputy Comptroller for Pensions and the Chief Investment Officer and Trustee of the New York City pension funds, whose assets grew from $100 billion to $145 billion under his leadership. He was named 2012 CIO of The Year - Large Public Pension Funds by Institutional Investor.
In addition to serving on the Board of Trustees of Tulane University, Mr. Schloss is the Vice Chair of the New York Police and Fire Widows' Fund and the Children's Benefit Fund, and he has served on the boards of directors of numerous public and private companies, including Girls Who Invest.
Jonathan Pritchett is the recipient of the 2017 Schloss Prize for Excellence in Economics for excellence in research.
Jon received a B.A. in economics from the University of Florida and a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Chicago. He taught at the University of Chicago and the University of Michigan before coming to Tulane. He has been at Tulane since 1985.
Jon has made outstanding contributions to the Department of Economics in all dimensions of teaching, service, and research. He has taught the Department’s large introductory microeconomics classes, and his upper-level classes on economic history are enormously popular. Jon has also made remarkable contributions to service and outreach, including serving as the Director of Undergraduate Studies for more than 15 years, advising countless undergraduate majors, supervising and co-authoring research with dozens of undergraduate students, co-organizing the construction of the Department’s econometrics laboratory, winning and co-supervising a National Science Foundation grant that provided research opportunities for undergraduate economics students from Tulane University and other institutions, and serving on a wide range of committees for the School of Liberal Arts and for Tulane University. Jon has also served as Chair of the Department of Economics.
Jon is receiving the 2017 Schloss Prize for his many outstanding research contributions. Much of his scholarship evaluates the economics of the slave trade of the United States, often focused on the New Orleans slave market and typically based on the painstaking examination of archival data sets. In the last year, Jon has published the following articles:
- “Betting on Secession: Quantifying Political Events Surrounding Slavery and the Civil War” (with Charles Calomiris), The American Economic Review (2016).
- “The Occupations of Slaves Sold in New Orleans: Missing Values, Cheap Talk, or Informative Advertising?” (with Jessica Hayes), Cliometrica (2016).
- “A Peculiar Sample: A Reply to Steckel and Ziebarth” (with Herman Freudenberger), Journal of Economic History (2016).
More details on Jon’s many activities can be found on his Tulane website, at: http://www.tulane.edu/~pritchet/ .
The Department of Economics is fortunate to have Jon as a colleague, as is Tulane University. The Department’s selection committee (Doug Harris, Nora Lustig, and James Alm) was unanimous in recommending that Jon be the 2017 recipient of the Lawrence M. v. D. Schloss Prize for Excellence in Economics.
The Department of Economics is very grateful to Mr. Schloss for his generous and ongoing support, which has made possible the recognition of Jon’s accomplishments. Mr. Schloss has also supported the Department in other important ways. In his ongoing efforts to improve student understanding of basic concepts in economics and finance, Mr. Schloss has worked with Carole Haber, Dean of the School of Liberal Arts, to develop a course on financial literacy for the Strategy, Leadership and Analytics Minor (or SLAM). As part of these efforts, Mr. Schloss has initiated the Lawrence M. v. D. Schloss Professorship of Practice in Economics, to support the teaching of this course.
Previous Schloss Prize winners are Marco Castaneda (2009); Jay Shimshack (2010); Stefano Barbieri (2011); Keith Finlay and Douglas Nelson (2012); Alan Barreca and Jonathan Pritchett (2013); Douglas Harris and Sean Higgins (2014); James R. Alm (2015); and Nora Lustig (2016).