Professor Judith Chevalier Elected to American Academy of Arts and Sciences

New Haven, Conn., April 25, 2006—Judith A. Chevalier, the William S. Beinecke Professor of Finance and Economics at the Yale School of Management, has been named a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Professor Chevalier is one of 175 new fellows and 20 foreign honorary members elected to the 226th class of the Academy. Other newly elected fellows include former Presidents George H.W. Bush and William Jefferson Clinton; Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts; Nobel Prize-winning biochemist and Rockefeller University President Sir Paul Nurse; Elbert Rutan, designer and constructor of the spacecraft Voyager; and Charles Thacker, designer of the world's first personal computer workstation.

Founded in 1780, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences is an international learned society composed of the world's leading scientists, scholars, artists, business people, and public leaders. The Academy “recognizes individuals who have made preeminent contributions to their disciplines and to society at large.”

Chevalier is an expert on industrial organization and corporate finance. Her recent work has examined the consumer choice behavior in durable goods markets using data from college bookstores, the effects of state regulations in the funeral industry, competition between the online booksellers Amazon and Barnes & Noble, and the question of why prices don't rise during periods of peak demand.

Her many other research interests include the problems facing durable goods manufacturers; the interaction between firm capital structure and product market competition; the impact of liquidity restraints on markup, inventory and capital expenditure cyclicality; testing models of agency and career concerns; the impact of “noise traders” on financial markets; and cross-subsidization of activities within conglomerate firms.

Chevalier’s past honors include a Sloan Research Fellowship, the Smith Breeden Distinguished Paper Prize for a work published in the Journal of Finance, and a research grant and graduate fellowship from the National Science Foundation. In 1999, Chevalier won the first biennial Elaine Bennett Prize given by the American Economic Association in recognition of research by a young woman in any area of economics.

A former editor of BE Journals in Economic Analysis and Policy, Chevalier is currently co-editor of the American Economic Review. She has also served as associate editor on numerous other publications. She is an elected member of the Executive Committee of the American Economic Association.

The newly elected members will be formally inducted in a ceremony on October 7 at the Academy's headquarters in Cambridge, Mass.