Samuelson Award goes to 3 finance professors

NEW YORK — Three finance professors — Robert M. Dammon, Chester S. Spatt, and Harold H. Zhang — will share in the ninth annual Paul A. Samuelson Award for Outstanding Scholarly Writing on Lifelong Financial Security.

They will split the $10,000 prize.

They won for their published in the June 2004 issue of The Journal of Finance. It analyzes optimal asset allocation for investors and how much to invest through taxable and tax-deferred accounts.

"Because bonds incur a higher tax burden than equities, the authors recommend that investors hold taxable bonds in tax-deferred accounts and hold equities in taxable accounts to the extent possible," according to a statement about the award. For young investors, the optimal placement between tax-deferred and taxable accounts can increase accumulated after-tax wealth by nearly 15% over their lifetimes, the statement noted.

The award is administered by the TIAA-CREF Institute, the educational arm of TIAA-CREF, New York, which finances the prize, and it is named for the Nobel economics prize laureate and former TIAA-CREF director.

Mr. Dammon is professor of financial economics at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh.

Mr. Spatt is Mellon Bank professor of finance, also of Carnegie Mellon, and director of its Center for Financial Markets. He has been on leave since last July to serve as chief economist at the Securities and Exchange Commission, Washington, through 2006.

Mr. Zhang is associate professor of finance at the Kenan-Flagler Business School at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

A Certificate of Excellence was awarded to Amy Finkelstein and James Poterba for their paper, "Adverse Selection in Insurance Markets: Policyholder Evidence From the U.K. Annuity Market," published in the February 2004 issue of the Journal of Political Economy. The two will share a $1,000 prize.

In their analysis, the authors found systematic relationships between mortality and annuity characteristics. "On average, the buyers of annuities that provide ‘backloaded' payout streams, such as increasing the annual payout with the rate of inflation, live longer than annuitants who purchase level nominal annuities," the statement noted.

Ms. Finkelstein is a junior fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows, Cambridge, Mass., and faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research, also of Cambridge.

Mr. Poterba is the Mitsui professor of economics and the associate head of the economics department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research.