Economics professor Jonathan Levin ’94 won the prestigious 2011 Clark medal, according to a press release from the American Economic Association (AEA). The medal, named after economist John Bates Clark, recognizes the nation’s most promising economist under the age of 40.

“This award in the past has been won by many people whose research I’ve admired and have been reading since graduate school,” Levin said. “It’s an incredible honor to be recognized.”

Levin is the son of Yale President Richard C. Levin. He studied English and mathematics at Stanford and obtained a master’s in economics from Oxford in 1996 and a Ph.D. in economics from MIT in 1999.

The Clark award is known as the “baby Nobel,” because of the 32 economists who have won it, 14 have gone on to win the Nobel Prize in economics. Past Clark and Nobel winners include Paul Samuelson and Milton Friedman.

The AEA cited several areas of Levin’s research in industrial organization in its award announcement. Levin has studied subprime lending, health insurance, Internet markets and how firms and markets interact with each other.

Levin began his economics career as a game theorist but became interested in empirical research after he came to Stanford. His later research involves the economics of auction and auction design, and he currently teaches an undergraduate class on market design.

“A lot of my current research is on the economics of Internet markets,” Levin said. “That’s the thing that I’ve gotten interested in [in] the last couple of years of being in Silicon Valley, and I’ve been studying different Internet markets for advertising, for e-commerce and the design of online markets — how they’re different from offline markets, the way technology has changed from behavior and the way that different markets can be structured.”

Next fall, Levin will also start a three-year term as chair of the department of economics. At the same time, Levin plans to continue his current trajectory and expects to pursue Internet-related research projects. He will nonetheless keep an open mind for other projects of interest.

“I think one of the nice things about being an academic is, as long as you keep an open mind, interesting questions come up and you can start to pursue them and see where they go,” he said. “That’s always been the way that I’ve done research in the past, and I expect that’s how I’ll continue to do it in the future.”