Joseph Stiglitz

Nobel Prize in Economics


Joseph E. Stiglitz was born in Gary, Indiana in 1943. A graduate of Amherst College, he received his PHD from MIT in 1967, became a full professor at Yale in 1970, and in 1979 was awarded the John Bates Clark Award, given biennially by the American Economic Association to the economist under 40 who has made the most significant contribution to the field. He has taught at Princeton, Stanford, MIT and was the Drummond Professor and a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. He is now Professor of Economics and Finance at Columbia University in New York. In 2001, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics.


Stiglitz helped create a new branch of economics, "The Economics of Information," exploring the consequences of information asymmetries and pioneering such pivotal concepts as adverse selection and moral hazard, which have now become standard tools not only of theorists, but of policy analysts. He has made major contributions to macro-economics and monetary theory, to development economics and trade theory, to public and corporate finance, to the theories of industrial organization and rural organization, and to the theories of welfare economics and of income and wealth distribution. In the 1980s, he helped revive interest in the economics of R&D.


He was awarded the 2004 Nobel Prize together with Finn Kydland (Carnegie Mellon University and the University of California), and received numerous prizes during his career, among which the Erwin Plein Nemmers Prize in Economics in 2003 and an academic award from the "Tor Vergata" University of Rome in 2002. He is currently a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Science and the Econometric Society. He has held a number of visiting professorships at universities throughout the United States and Europe.