The UWA Business School congratulates Economics alumnus Dr Simon Mongey on receiving the 2026 Frisch Medal, one of the most prestigious awards for research published in Econometrica.
Dr Mongey shares the award with Adrien Bilal, Niklas Engbom and Giovanni L. Violante for their paper, “Firm and Worker Dynamics in a Frictional Labor Market,” published in Econometrica in 2022.
Awarded biennially by the Econometric Society, the Frisch Medal recognises the best applied—empirical or theoretical—paper published in Econometrica over the preceding four years.
The award-winning paper brings together two major areas of economic research—firm dynamics and frictional labour markets—to develop a unified framework for understanding how firms and workers interact when finding and changing jobs is costly. The research provides new insights into questions including the efficiency costs of labour market frictions and the role of new firms in supporting workers’ progression through the labour market.
Dr Mongey graduated from The University of Western Australia in 2009 with a Bachelor of Arts in Economics and Commerce. He subsequently completed Honours in Economics at the University of Melbourne and a PhD in Economics at New York University.
He is currently a Monetary Advisor at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, as well as an Adjunct Associate Professor at the University of Minnesota and a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research. His research spans macroeconomics, labour economics and market structure.
Dean and Head of the UWA Business School, Professor Peter Robertson, congratulated Dr Mongey on the achievement.
“The Frisch Medal is an exceptional recognition of Simon’s contribution to economics. We are immensely proud to count him among our UWA Economics alumni and to see the impact his research is having internationally. Simon’s achievements are also a wonderful example to our students and early-career researchers of where an education in economics can lead. We look forward to the opportunity to celebrate this remarkable achievement with him when he is next in Perth.”
The UWA Economics community warmly congratulates Simon and his co-authors on this outstanding achievement.