The future stars of the economics profession?

I still remember reading twenty years ago in the UK weekly magazine The Economist, to which I have subscribed for many years, an article about who it considered the most promising young academic economists listing: Larry Summers, Jeffrey Sachs, Andrei Shleifer, Paul Krugman, Gregory Mankiw, Sanford Grossman, Alberto Alesina and Jean Tirole. They were very good picks, although I suspect that being selected for the list would have done no harm to their future careers.

The Economist repeated the exercise a decade later (17 December 1998) picking out: Michael Kremer, Edward Glaeser, Casey Mulligan, Steve Levitt, Caroline Hoxby, Glenn Ellison, Judith Chevalier, Wolfgang Pesendorfer, Timothy Feddersen, Matthew Rabin and David Laibson.

It has just done so for the third time (HT to Greg Mankiw). The latest article lists: Jesse Shapiro (Chicago), Roland Fryer, Esther Duflo, Amy Finkelstein, Raj Chetty, Iván Werning, Xavier Gabaix and Marc Melitz.