The economist of uncertainty, Charles Manski, wins the Frontiers of Knowledge Award

BarcelonaAmerican economist Charles Manski has been awarded the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Economics, Finance and Management, now in its eighteenth year, for his pioneering contributions to calculating uncertainty in economic research and its application to public policy analysis. The professor at Northwestern University (Chicago, USA) has been a "key figure," according to the jury's statement, in the development of modern econometric methods. These methods have transformed how economists draw conclusions from data, recognize the degree of uncertainty in their models, and evaluate public policies when evidence is incomplete. Sir Richard Blundell, holder of the David Ricardo Chair of Political Economy at University College London (UK), noted that Manski's work "has revealed some of the erroneous assumptions we economists make that render our predictions and our understanding of behavior quite fragile." "He has taught us to carefully examine the assumptions on which our analyses are based and to ground both our predictions and our understanding of behavior in credible evidence." "He is a great innovator in empirical measurement methods in economics and the social sciences," said Manuel Arellano, Professor of Economics at the Center for Monetary and Financial Studies (CEMFI) of the Bank of Spain and secretary of the jury.

Over five decades, Manski's research "has profoundly influenced empirical research in the fields of education, health policy, labor markets, industrial policy, and social programs by encouraging economists to rely on reliable and transparent inferences regarding assumptions." Professor Arellano also highlighted his great influence on the measurement of expectations by economic agents: "Businesses, households, individuals," he explained, "make decisions or refrain from making them based on the certainty we have about our future circumstances and uncertainty."

"Most economists," Manski himself has stated, "shun uncertainty and prefer to obtain firm answers to questions. This is especially true in the study of public policy. Citizens want answers to know if a policy is good or bad, and economists like to provide them." For this reason, the award-winning researcher believes that conclusions often presented in the field of economics are characterized by what he calls "unbelievable certainty," with figures and percentages that lack sufficient empirical support.

Other award winners

The BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Awards, endowed with €400,000 in each of the eight categories, recognize and encourage contributions to basic sciences, biomedicine, environmental sciences and climate change, information and communication technologies, social sciences, economics, the humanities, and music. Other awardees include research figures such as Carl June and Michel Sadelain—for revolutionizing cancer treatment through immunotherapy based on the genetic modification of the patient's own cells—engineers Joan Daemen and Vincent Rijmen—for designing the cryptography system that protects security—and Pablo Jarillo-Herrero—for discovering the "magic angle" that allows for transforming and controlling the behavior of new materials. A total of 34 Frontiers of Knowledge Award laureates have subsequently received the Nobel Prize. In particular, fourteen laureates in the Economics, Finance and Management category have subsequently been recognized by the Swedish Academy: Lars Peter Hansen (2013), Jean Tirole (2014), Angus Deaton (2015), William Nordhaus (2018), Abhijit Banerje (2021), Ben Bernanke (2022), Claudia Goldin (2023), Daron Acemoglu (2024), and Philippe Aghion and Peter Howitt (2025).