Yuliy Sannikov, a professor of economics at Princeton University,  has been awarded the 2016 John Bates Clark Medal by the American Economic Association (AEA). One of the most prestigious and eagerly anticipated AEA awards, the John Bates Clark Medal is awarded annually each April (formerly biennially from 1947-2009) to that American economist under the age of forty who is judged to have made the most significant contribution to economic thought and knowledge.

Sannikov's research interests include game theory, contract theory, macroeconomics and financial frictions, corporate finance, market microstructure, security design, and computation. In making the award announcement, the AEA said his work "is elegant, powerful, and it paves the way for further analysis on lots of problems...... His most recent work has tackled complex models in finance and macroeconomics. Previous models abstracted from crucial economic forces in the name of tractability, but Sannikov’s methods allow models to include the most important forces and thus deliver results that are much more relevant. He is one of the few theorists in many years to have introduced a truly novel tool that changed the way theory is done. "