Especially if you're a scientist.
Bioscience Technology covered a recent paper in Management Science which points out that life sciences investigators see a 12 percent increase in citation rates, on average, after becoming Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigators. Being associated with HHMI is considered prestigious but most accounts.
Among the main things the authors observed: Big gains in citation rates post-award were seen for people working in new areas of research, publishing in lower impact journals, and for younger researchers. However, the effect of a new prize isn't very significant if people were publishing work in big name journals already.
Since citations are usually given freely, the study does seem to support the idea of prizes as a mark of quality and a signal that reading work from that particular person is more likely to be worthwhile, and in general awards serve to build up a personal brand that's similar to that of big-name journals. Hot journals generally contain quality work, so work from someone who's been recognized with an award should also be interesting (though it's not hard to find lukewarm papers in hot journals, and reading work from HHMI investigators is no guarantee that it will be hot).
See the original paper here. Unfortunately, it's paywalled unless you're at an institution that gives you access.
