The Nancy and Richard Ruggles Memorial provides for a Prize for a researcher or researchers aged 35 or under. The aim of the Prize is to promote the development of young researchers by recognizing their outstanding scholarship. One Prize will be awarded competitively on the basis of a paper presented at the General Conference of the International Association for Research in Income and Wealth (IARIW) and judged by the Nancy and Richard Ruggles Memorial Prize Committee. The next Prize will be awarded during the next IARIW General Conference to be held in Brussels in August 2026. Papers can be authored by a single researcher or several researchers, all of whom must be equal to or less than 35 years of age on February 1, 2026 to be eligible for the Prize.
In order to be considered for the next Prize, authors must:
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- By the conference’s deadline (tba), submit an abstract for the IARIW 38th General Conference. The abstract must represent unpublished original work that is on a subject relevant to the interests of the IARIW.
- Once your abstract has been accepted for the 39th General Conference of the IARIW, you will need to submit the unpublished original paper associated with the abstract by the deadline.
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The value of the Prize is $2,500 (U.S. dollars) in total, regardless of the number of authors. The successful author or one of the co-authors will be required to attend the IARIW conference to accept the Prize. The winner or co-winners of the Nancy and Richard Memorial Prize will be notified by August 18, 2026.
Sanjiv Mahajan and Conchita D’Ambrosia are the members of the Nancy and Richard Ruggles Memorial Prize committee.
2026 Winner
- Arthur Apostel (University of Ghent) for the paper, Pre-Death Gifts and Regressive Wealth Transfer Taxation: Evidence from Belgium
Previous Winners
2024 Prize
- Daniel Ripperger-Suhler (U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis) for the paper Consumer Learning and Outlet Substitution Bias: How Diffusion of Product Quality Knowledge Impacts Measures of Price Change?
2022 Prize
- 2022 Prize was not presented.
2021 Prize
- Anthony Lepinteur (University of Luxembourg) and Sofie Waltl (Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research (LISER) and Vienna University of Economics and Business, Austria)) for the paper Tracking Owners’ Sentiments: Subjective Home Values, Expectations and House Price Dynamics
2018 Prize
- Stefan Angel (Vienna University of Economics and Busines (WU), Austria), Stefan Humer (Vienna University of Economics and Busines (WU), Austria), Franziska Disslbacher (Vienna University of Economics and Busines (WU), Austria) and Matthias Schetzer (Chamber of Labour, Austria) for the paper What did you really Earn Last Year? Explaining Measurement Error in Survey Income Data
2016 Prize
- Guido Neidhofer (Free University of Berlin, Germany) for the paper Intergenerational Mobility and the Rise and Fall of Inequality: Lessons from Latin America
2014 Prize
- Natalie Quinn (University of Oxford, UK) for the paper Chronic and Transient Poverty in Rural Ethiopia: A New Decomposition
2012 Prize
- Shatakshee Dhongde (Georgia Institute of Technology, USA) for the paper Measuring Segregation of the Poor in India
2010 Prize
- Indrajit Bairagya (Institute for Social and Economic Change, India) for the paper Liberalization, Informal Sector and Formal-Informal Sectors’ Relationship: A Study of India.
2008 Prize
- 2008 Prize was not presented.
2006 Prize
- Cecilla Kwok Ying Lam (Department of Economics, The University of Birmingham) for the paper “Estimating Cross-country Technical Efficiency, Economic Performance and Institutions: A Stochastic Production Frontier Approach”.
2004 Prize
- to Orsolya Lelkes (Ministry of Finance, Budapest) for the paper “Knowing what is good for you. Empirical analysis of personal preferences and the “objective good”.