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 2025 recipients of the Lawrence M. v. D. Schloss Prize for Excellence in Economics are Katy Bergstrom and William Dodds. They will each receive a cash award of $2500.
We give this award each year to "the professor who makes the greatest contribution to the advancement of the study of economics at Tulane University."
- Bergstrom and Dodds co-authored a paper (with J. Rios), "Welfare Analysis of Changing Notches: Evidence from Bolsa Família," in American Economic Journal: Economic Policy. This paper makes methodological contributions and provides new empirical advances about important public policy.
- The committee also noted their many other strong publications they have co-authored over the past several years. Those publications have been spread over time in ways that can go under-recognized in these annual awards.
- Separately, William won the IIPF Young Economist Award for his paper, "Solving Multidimensional Screening Problems Using a Generalized Single Crossing Property." And Katy published joint work with Susan Athey and colleagues, "Can personalized digital counseling improve consumer search for personal contraceptive devices?" in Science Advances.
- Bergstrom and Dodds are also among our best instructors and have taken our course offerings in helpful new directions with Development Economics (Bergstrom) and Big Data (Dodds). In addition, they have served on faculty searches which can be very time-consuming.
Both Katy and William have been outstanding department members in every dimension.
More details on Dr. Bergstrom’s and Dr. Dodds’ activities can be found on their department webpages.
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), Patrick Button (2023), Elliott Isaac and Patrick Testa (2024).