Recently, Associate Professor Nathan Schiff was awarded the Urban Land Institute (ULI) Academic Prize for his paper “Cities and Product Variety: Evidence from Restaurants” published in Journal of Economic Geography (issue 6, 2015).
The ULI Academic Prize, now in its second year, is jointly awarded by the ULI, the Journal of Economic Geography (JOEG) and Oxford University Press. It is granted annually to the author(s) of the best JOEG paper published online in the previous calendar year. The prize-winning paper is decided by a committee comprising two members of the JOEG Advisory Board and one member nominated by the ULI on the basis of the submitted papers’ creativity, quality of scholarship, and academic contribution to advancing understanding of the geographic nature of economic systems and global economic change.
Professor Schiff’s winning paper measures restaurant variety in US cities and argues that city structure directly increases product variety by spatially aggregating demand. It was commended by the award committee as remarkable ‘for its theoretical sophistication and scope of empirical analysis, and one that promises to set the scene for a decade to come.’
Professor Nathan Schiff received his Ph.D. in Economics from Brown University in 2009. He first worked as an assistant professor at the Sauder School of Business, University of British Columbia before joining the School of Economics at SUFE in the fall of 2014. His research fields are urban economics, industrial organization, and public economics with a general focus on the interaction between economics and geography. He has published quality papers in leading economics journals such as Journal of Political Economy.
