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Professor Sangeeta Pratap Awarded Mexico’s Top Prize for Economics

Professor Sangeeta Pratap Awarded Mexico’s Top Prize for Economics

Felipe Meza Goiz, Carlos Ernesto Vilialobos and Sangeeta Pratap

Professor Sangeeta Pratap of the Economics Department has been awarded the Banamex Prize, an annual award recognizing the best research, analysis, and solutions to the economic problems in Mexico. This international prize, Mexico’s highest and most distinguished economic award, is administered by the Banco Nacional de Mexico, the largest commercial bank in Mexico.

For more than 60 years, this award has selected and championed the work of some of the most notable minds in economics in and around Mexico, including writer and intellectual Grabriel Zaid, Governor of the Bank of Mexico Augustín Carstens, economist Santiago Levy, and former Secretary of Finance and Public Credit Luis Videgaray Caso. Now, Professor Pratap – and her co-authors, Carlos Urrutia and Felipe Meza – joins their ranks, earning the prize for their paper, “Credit, Misallocation and Productivity Growth.”

Jointly written with colleagues from the Instituto Tenológico Autónomo de México (ITAM), where she worked for 8 years before coming to Hunter, Professor Pratap’s paper analyzes the linkages between the cost and availability of credit and the efficiency of different economic sectors. The authors found that economic growth is possible – even in a macro-economic crunch, when general credit availability is low – if credit is carefully allocated towards certain sectors of the economy that are primed to use it most effectively and increase productivity. Economic growth, the authors determine, depends on strategic resource management.

This paper, which uses novel data sets and state of the art macroeconomic models, is well in line with the rest of Professor Pratap’s interests and research, which include macroeconomics, development economics, and econometrics. She was born in India and studied at universities in India, the UK, and the United States, earning her Ph.D. in Economics from New York University. She joined the Hunter Faculty in 2006, and has since published several other scholarly articles, in economics journals such as the Journal of Monetary EconomicsEuropean Economic Review, and Review of Economic Dynamics, among others. In addition to her previous professorship at ITAM and her current one at Hunter, Professor Pratap has also held visiting positions at the European University Institute in Florence and the Paris School of Economics.

"I have worked for several years analyzing the processes of economic development in Mexico, a country very dear to my heart,” says Professor Pratap. “I am thrilled to receive the Banamex prize along with my co-authors recognizing our work."

She traveled to Mexico City for the award ceremony on December 13th, where the prize was given by Mexican Minister of Finance Jose Antonio Meade. Congratulations to Professor Pratap on this outstanding honor.

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