Former chair Bill Branch, 2026 medal recipient Miguel Zerecero, and current department chair Matthew Freedman
  • October 22, 2026

  • Inaugural recipient – assistant professor Miguel Zerecero – recognized for novel, influential work on why people choose the places in which they live

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How does airline traffic affect U.S. employment? Do local governments engage in property tax competition? How do building height regulations affect city size? Over the course of his 40-year academic career, UC Irvine Distinguished Professor emeritus Jan K. Brueckner has pursued groundbreaking research spanning urban and public economics, transportation economics and real estate finance. Published widely in top journals including the American Economic Review, the Journal of Public Economics, and the Journal of Urban Economics where he served as editor for 16 years, Brueckner’s work answers important questions that impact how we live, work and travel. While he officially retired from UCI in 2025, Brueckner remains an active researcher and frequent expert voice on these and other timely topics.

In honor of his important contributions, the Department of Economics has established the aptly named Jan K. Brueckner Medal for Distinction in Economic Research. It recognizes a UCI scholar in the early years of an academic career whose work has made an original contribution to economic knowledge. The medal honors research that asks novel questions, uses rigorous methods, and, like Brueckner’s work, is influential within the field.

The department is pleased to announce Miguel Zerecero, economics assistant professor, as the inaugural Brueckner Medal recipient. Zerecero is a macroeconomist whose research spans spatial and labor economics. He’s particularly interested in how differences in birthplace affect differences in standards of living across people within the same country. His work finds that people born in economically distressed areas face more disadvantages than those born in areas with access to more opportunity. Using advanced modeling and methods, his research aims to quantify how much of the welfare inequality can be attributed to this issue. In naming Zerecero as the Brueckner Medal’s first recipient, the award committee cited his “research that asks why people stay in struggling places, and what determines wages when firms and unions both hold labor market power. His work on attachment to birthplace documents that workers accept wages roughly ten percent lower to live where they were born, and shows that models ignoring this attachment overstate both how readily workers move and the efficiency cost of place-based policy. With a co-author, he finds in a separate paper now under revision at Econometrica that union bargaining partially offsets the misallocation created by employer power. Meanwhile, his methodological work corrects bias in wage decompositions and dramatically speeds up the inversion algorithms used across trade, urban economics, and industrial organization. The committee was persuaded by both the ambition of the questions and the care with which the methods supporting them have been built.”

Zerecero earned his bachelor’s at the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México and his master’s and doctorate at the Toulouse School of Economics in France. He joined the UCI faculty in 2021.

pictured: Former department chair Bill Branch, 2026 inaugural medal recipient Miguel Zerecero, and current department chair Matthew Freedman.

 

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