Sherwin Rosen Prize 2024 Recipient 

Rebecca Diamond

Committee: Gordon Dahl (chair), Francisca Antman, David Figlio, Jennifer Hunt, David Deming

Rebecca Diamond is the Class of 1988 Professor of Economics at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Diamond received her PhD in Economics from Harvard in 2013 and spent one year as a postdoctoral scholar at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research before joining the Stanford GSB faculty. She has served as a coeditor of the Journal of Public Economics and an associate editor at AEJ: Applied and Econometrica.

Rebecca is a brilliant and creative scholar who has made important contributions on a wide range of labor topics, especially including urban issues such as housing, spatial sorting, and inequality. She uses a range of innovative methods in her work and connects deep theoretical questions in economics to creative empirical analysis.

Her most important impact to date comes from her work on the economic implications of divergent location choices by workers of different skill levels. In “The Determinants and Welfare Implications of US Workers’ Diverging Location Choices by Skill: 1980-2000” (AER, 2016, lead article), she observes that the rise in the U.S. college wage premium coincided with increased geographic sorting as college graduates concentrated in high wage, high rent cities. Using a structural spatial equilibrium model combined with credible quasi-experimental variation, she finds that geographic sorting led to welfare changes that were substantially greater than what is implied by the growth in the college wage premium alone.

Rebecca has also made important contributions to housing policy and urban economics. In “The Effects of Rent Control Expansions on Tenants, Landlords, and Inequality: Evidence from San Francisco” (AER 2019, with Tim McQuade and Franklin Qian), she studies the impact of rent control using a careful quasi-experimental design and finds that it leads to reductions in housing supply through sale and redevelopment, which in turn increases gentrification, drives up rents, and makes housing less affordable. In a complementary paper (JPE 2019, with Tim McQuade) she finds that Low-Income Housing Tax Credits have positive spillover effects on nearby properties, increasing housing prices, lowering crime and increasing racial diversity. She has also shown that housing supply inelasticity increases a local governments’ ability to extract rents, a clever test of the “Leviathan” hypothesis (AEJ: Policy, 2017).

Rebecca has also written important papers on other topics, such as high-skilled immigration, gender wage gaps, and nutritional inequality.

In “The Contribution of High-Skilled Immigrants to Innovation in the United States” (AER forthcoming, with Shai Bernstein, Timothy McQuade and Beatriz Pousada), she gathers and matches data to form a unique dataset on inventors and their patents. In addition to providing a wealth of new descriptive information on immigrants’ disproportionate contribution to patenting quantity and quality, she uses clever models and identification techniques to show causally that they have greater positive inventive spillovers than native inventors and that they make a disproportionate contribution to the economic benefits flowing from patents.

Rebecca shows in “The Gender Earnings Gap in the Gig Economy: Evidence from over a Million Rideshare Drivers” (RESTUD 2021, with Cody Cook, Jonathan Hall, John List, and Paul Oyer) that the gender earnings gap among Uber drivers is explained by a combination of differential experience with the platform, preferences and constraints over work location, and higher driving speed.
In “Food Deserts and the Causes of Nutritional Inequality” (QJE 2019, with Hunt Allcott, Jean-Pierre Dube, Jesse Handbury, Ilya Rahkovsky, and Molly Schnell), Rebecca and her coauthors exploit temporal variation in supermarket entry and household moves to show that access only explains about 10 percent of nutritional inequality, with the remaining 90 percent driven by consumer demand.