Milken Institute Awards Its 2003 Distinguished Economic Research Prize to Seven Scholars.

Business Editors

LOS ANGELES--(BUSINESS WIRE)--April 3, 2003

Seven researchers from the United States and Belgium have been named winners of the 2003 Milken Institute Award for Distinguished Economic Research.

Six of the winners were honored for their work examining such issues as technological causes of obesity, the impact of brain drain on developing countries, and the links between drug development and human longevity.

The seventh winner, Richard L. Sandor, received a special award this year for financial innovations for the creation of the Chicago Climate Exchange, an organization of leading U.S. and international companies that have adopted a market-based program for trading and reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

The scholars will be honored this week at the Milken Institute Global Conference in Los Angeles. Each winning paper comes with a $1,000 prize for its authors.

This year's winners are:

-- Darius Lakdawalla, an Associate Economist at RAND Corp., and

Tomas Philipson, Professor, Irving B Harris Graduate School of

Public Policy Studies, The Law School, and The Department of

Economics, The University of Chicago. Their paper,

"Technological Change and the Growth of Obesity: A Theoretical

and Empirical Examination," argues that technological

progress, such as improved agricultural techniques that have

lowered food costs, have led to the growth in obesity in

developed countries.

-- Frank R. Lichtenberg, Professor of Business at Columbia

University. His paper, "Pharmaceutical Knowledge - Capital

Accumulation & Longevity," studied the contribution of

pharmaceutical research and development to human longevity,

and found that so-called priority-review drugs - those

considered to offer significant improvements in the treatment

or prevention of a disease - had a considerable positive

impact on increasing lifespan.

-- Hillel Rapoport, Visiting Research Fellow, CREDPR, Department

of Economics at Stanford University, Michel Beine, Universite

Libre de Bruxelles, and Frederic Docquier, Service des Etudes

et de la Statistique, Ministere de la Region Wallonne in

Belgium. Rapoport, Beine and Docquier are also affiliated with

CADRE, University of Lille 2 in France. Their paper, "Brain

Drain and LDCs' Growth: Winners and Losers," finds that,

despite the traditional view that "brain drain" only helps the

developed nations to which foreign workers emigrate, many of

the less-developed countries they left are also helped through

the positive impact of migration prospects on human capital

formation at home.

The fourth prize - given this year to an individual who helps the public good through the use of innovative financial tools - goes to Richard L. Sandor, the founder, Chairman and CEO of the Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX).

CCX is an organization of major U.S. and international companies and the City of Chicago that have agreed to voluntarily reduce their emissions of greenhouse gases through a unique trading exchange. The participants agree to reduce their emissions 1 percent each year for four years, from 2003 through 2006. CCX will enable them to receive credit for such reductions and to buy and sell credits in order to find the most cost-effective way of achieving reductions. Trading is targeted to begin in the late spring of 2003.

This first-ever U.S. trading program designed to reduce carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions has been hailed by environmentalists as well as government and corporate officials as a sensible, market-based approach to reducing pollution believed to cause global warming.

The Milken Institute Award for Distinguished Economic Research was created four years ago to honor the best research in economics.