Robert M. Townsend, an economics professor at MIT, has won the Frisch Medal of the Econometric Society for the second time, the first economist to do so.

Townsend shared this year’s award with Joseph Kaboski of the University of Notre Dame, who is a former student of Townsend’s.

The announcement was made by the Consortium on Financial Systems & Poverty, a private organization at the University of Chicago that conducts research on changes to financial systems that can improve the lives of the world’s poor. Townsend and Kaboski are affiliated researchers with the consortium.

The medal is awarded every two years for the best empirical or theoretical applied paper published in the journal Econometrica.