Kit Baum awarded major prize for SSC work

[Nick Cox]

The American Economic Association have announced that their 2023 AEA Distinguished Service Award has been awarded to Christopher (Kit) Baum, Boston College, for his multi-decade volunteer efforts to promote open-source repositories, transparency, and reproducibility within the profession. Professor Baum established the Statistical Software Components (SSC) archive in 1997 and has been the custodian of this archive ever since. His setting up and maintaining of SSC have made and continue to make an enormous contribution to the empirical research community worldwide and have helped democratize access to methods at the frontier of econometrics. Visit https://www.aeaweb.org/about-aea/hon...-service-award for more information.

To which people in the Stata community can only add much deserved congratulations to KitBaum, who is naturally a member here, and indeed flag that his work developing and maintaining SSC benefits very many Stata users well beyond those in econometrics.

[Stephen Jenkins]

Hear, hear! Well deserved recognition for Kit. (The AEA award is a big honour.)

[Rich Goldstein]

well deserved - congratulations to Kit!

[Clyde Schechter]

Fantastic. Kit has provided an enormous service to the entire Stata community, not just the many economists therein. This type of work is time-consuming, and extremely valuable, yet typically goes unrewarded. I am delighted to learn that his efforts are being recognized by the AEA!

[Carlo Lazzaro]

I am happy to replicate my yesterday's comment posted on a professional website: "Well deserved, Kit!".

[Joao Santos Silva]

Congratulations Kit, and many many thanks for all you do for us all.

[Alan Riley (StataCorp)]

Some of us at StataCorp have already congratulated Kit privately, but it is nice to recognize him in public as well! His creation and continued development of the SSC has been an incredible benefit to the worldwide research community. His vision for what was best for the community to share packages differed from our own initial vision here at StataCorp, where we envisioned packages being loosely distributed all over the place. Kit's vision was the right one. The award is well deserved! Congratulations and thank you, Kit!

[Richard Williams]

Way to go Kit! A richly deserved honor. SSC has been nearly as valuable to me as Stata is itself.

[Parke Wilde]

Thank you Kit Baum! This data resource has been valuable for increasing transparency and replicability in economics research, and it is super for teachers.

[Ilya Bolotov]

Congratulations!

[George Ford]

Kit has made a huge contribution not only to Stata but to empirical research generally. Thanks.

[Girish Venkataraman]

Indeed. Having downloaded so many programs over the past couple of years, I have all but forgotten that someone is making a huge effort on the backend to maintain and support this venture. Thanks much for all your work and contributions, Christopher.