W. P. Carey Chair of Economics, W. P. Carey School of Business, Arizona State University, USA
Senior monetary advisor, Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank, USA
for their contributions to dynamic macroeconomics: the time consistency of economic policy and the driving forces behind business cycles
Edward C. Prescott is W. P. Carey Chair of Economics in the W. P. Carey School of Business and a senior monetary advisor at the Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank.
Prescott is known for his seminal work in policy analysis, business cycles, economic development, general equilibrium theory, and finance. His examination of time inconsistency in the context of government policy making has helped shape the debate over the effectiveness of rules versus discretion in the conduct of economic policy. His work on business cycles has recast the way economists think about economic fluctuations, arguing that they represent the optimal response of the economy to various shocks.
He is a great economist – said Robert Lucas, Nobel Prize in 1995 and Prescott’s former colleague – he gave an extraordinary contribution to the economic thinking about the economic theory and its connections to reality
Prescott was lauded for a lifetime of original thinking that has addressed some of the most important long-standing questions in macroeconomics. 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.
Scholes, Myron S.