Baumol wins Italy's top scientific, cultural award

Professor Emeritus William Baumol has been named the recipient of the 2005 International Antonio Feltrinelli Prize for Physical, Mathematical and Natural Sciences by the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei in Rome.

Baumol will receive the award for his research across a broad range of topics in economics. The prize is awarded annually to a foreigner for accomplishments in (on a rotating basis) moral and historical sciences; physical, mathematical and natural sciences; letters; arts; and medicine and biology. It is Italy's highest scientific and cultural award, and it will be conferred at a ceremony in Rome this November.

Baumol is the Joseph Douglas Green, 1895, Professor of Economics Emeritus and senior research economist at Princeton. He joined the Princeton faculty in 1949 and transferred to emeritus status in 1992. He also is a professor of economics and academic director of the Berkley Center for Entrepreneurial Studies at New York University.

The recipient of 11 honorary degrees and the author of 40 books and hundreds of professional articles, Baumol has specialized in fields including economic growth, entrepreneurship and innovation, industrial organization, antitrust economics and regulation, the economics of cost for services such as health care and education, and economics of the arts.

He has served as president of four professional economics societies: the American Economic Association, the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, the Eastern Economic Association and the Atlantic Economic Society. He is also an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.