When Professor Yang Yao (PhD ’96) of Peking University was recently honored with the Ronald Coase Institute (RCI) Alumni Award for Outstanding Achievement, he turned right around and donated his monetary prize to the AAE Forrest Fund for Students. The award was given in recognition of his contributions to the field of institutional economics. His generous donation will help support AAE grad students with support for research, travel funds, and more. Professor Yao’s donation was made in honor of the support he received as both a student and an alumnus of AAE, in service of the next generation of outstanding economists. Yao served as a faculty participant at a recent RCI workshop on Institutional Analysis in Xiamen China, where he was joined by current AAE faculty member Dominic Parker.
The workshop was co-sponsored by the The School of Economics, Wang Yanan Institute for Studies in Economics, and the Gregory and Paula Chow Center for Economic Research, all at Xiamen University; and by the National Economics Foundation, China. Parker and Yao were two of just 13 faculty participants in this rigorous workshop which provides intense mentoring for advanced graduate students and post-doctoral students in the field of institutional economics.