W&L Professor Wins Prestigious Economics Prize Peter Grajzl named a 2022 winner of the Elinor Ostrom Prize.

By Brian Laubscher
September 21, 2022

Peter Grajzl, Ehrick Kilner Haight Sr. Professor of Economics at Washington and Lee University, was announced as a 2022 winner of the Elinor Ostrom Prize at the World Interdisciplinary Network for Institutional Research Conference earlier this month.

The Elinor Ostrom Prize is named after the late Nobel laureate, who was an enormously creative scholar and an outstanding pioneer of the interdisciplinary field of institutional research. The prize is awarded to the best full-length article published in the Journal of Institutional Economics (JoIE) in the preceding calendar year. This annual competition is judged by an international committee of experts in the field of institutional research. The award of £1000 is funded by the Foundation for European Economic Development.

Grajzl earned the award along with Peter Murrell from the University of Maryland at College Park. Grajzl and Murrell co-authored two articles in the JoIE in 2020. The first is titled “A machine-learning history of English caselaw and legal ideas prior to the Industrial Revolution I: generating and interpreting the estimates” and was published in August 2020. The second, titled “A machine-learning history of English caselaw and legal ideas prior to the Industrial Revolution II: applications,” was published the following month.

“I very much appreciate and am grateful for this professional recognition,” said Grajzl. “It is an honor to receive a prize named after one of the trailblazers in the research on institutions — the rules and norms that structure economic, political, legal and social interaction — and, at the same time, the first woman awarded the Nobel Prize in economics. I am also most pleased that the selection committee, comprised of distinguished scholars, saw value in a nonconventional research project that would have been hard to imagine using the lens of traditional approaches.”

Grajzl has been a member of the economics faculty at W&L since 2009. He holds a bachelor’s degree in economics from the University of Ljubljana and a doctorate in economics from the University of Maryland at College Park.

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