This paper analyses the evolution of economists’ productivity after an important award such as the John Bates Clark Medal or the “Nobel Prize”. A diff-in-diffs methodology is used, with a control group composed of economists with characteristics close to the members of the treatment group, who were awarded prizes. Several robustness checks are used with different indicators of productivity (articles, weighted or not by reviews’ rankings and working papers) and with or without economists and time fixed effects in panel estimates. We find that John Bates Clark Medals alter the (yearly cumulated) ranking of articles, while the number of publications remains unchanged, but only because of an increase in publications in non-ranked reviews. As regards Nobel Prizes, they neither alter the number of articles nor their quality.