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Schloss Prize for Excellence in Economics

Mr. Lawrence M. v. D. Schloss, 1976 graduate from Tulane University and member of the Board of Tulane, 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. 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.

The 2023 recipient of the Lawrence M. v. D. Schloss Prize for Excellence in Economics is Patrick Button. Patrick will receive a cash award of $5000.

Patrick has had an excellent year on so many different dimensions. First, on research, he accepted/published three articles, continuing his long-standing work in discrimination:

  • Balfe, Catherine, Patrick Button, Mary Penn*, and David Schwegman (forthcoming) “Infrequent Identity Signals and Detection Risks in Audit Correspondence Studies.” Field Methods.
  • Burn, Ian, Patrick Button, Luis Munguia Corella, and David Neumark. 2022. “Does Ageist Language in Job Ads Predict Age Discrimination in Hiring?” Journal of Labor Economics, 40(3): 613-67.
  • Button, Patrick, Mashfiqur Khan, and Mary Penn*. 2022. “Do Stronger Employment Discrimination Protections Decrease Reliance on Social Security Disability Insurance? Evidence from the Social Security Reforms." Journal of the Economics of Ageing, 22(June): 100370.

As he has done so many times before, he also actively involved our students in this work. The first author on the first paper above, Cathy Balfe, was an undergraduate (who is now headed to UCLA Law School). Mary Penn, who is a co-author on two of the above papers, is also a recent graduate of our PhD program. 

At the request of the Provost, Patrick has also taken on the role as Executive Director of the Data Hub: Tulane Center for Data Literacy. Going beyond service, this is an administrative role and one that will require considerable leadership--building a new institution from the ground up. 

Relatedly, Patrick has been a data hub all of his own to our PhD students who rave about his teaching of the applied econometrics course. It's hard to stay on top of all the latest methodological advancements in causal inference, but he's managing to do that on top of everything else.

Finally, Patrick continues to play a leadership role in the AEA, mentoring LBGTQ+ students and other young economists. See, for example, this description of a volume he recently contributed to on mentoring. He was also invited by AEA President Susan Athey to serve on an ad hoc committee to rethink the ASSA conference.

In short, Patrick has made outstanding contributions in research, service, and teaching.

More details on Patricks’s activities can be found on his Department of Economics website, at https://liberalarts.tulane.edu/departments/economics/people/patrick-button.

The Department of Economics is very grateful to Mr. Schloss for his generous and ongoing support, which has made possible the recognition of Patrick’s accomplishments. Previous Schloss Prize winners are Marco Castaneda (2009), Jay Shimshack (2010), Stefano Barbieri (2011), Keith Finlay and Douglas Nelson (2012), Alan Barreca and Jon Pritchett (2013), Doug Harris (2014), Sean Higgins (2014), James Alm (2015), Nora Lustig (2016), Jon Pritchett (2017), Patrick Button and Ali Enami (2018), Wei Long (2019),  Antonio Bojanic (2020), LaPorchia Collins, Toni Weiss, and Stefano Barbieri (2021), Elliott Isaac and Patrick Testa (2022).