Professor of Economics and Finance, Columbia Business School, Columbia University, USA
Professor of Economics and Finance, School of International and Public Affairs, USA
for their analyses of markets with asymmetric information
Joseph E. Stiglitz received his Ph.D. from MIT, 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 he is now University Professor at Columbia University in New York.
Member of the Council of Economic Advisors during the Clinton administration, he was then Senior Vice-President of the World Bank from 1997 to 2000.
In 2001, together with George Akerlof and Michael Spence, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences “for their analyses of markets with asymmetric information”, exploring the consequences of information asymmetries and pioneering such pivotal concepts as adverse selection and moral hazard, now standard tools of policy analysts. He has made major contributions to 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. His work has helped explain the circumstances in which markets do not work well, and how selective government intervention can improve their performance.
Recognized around the world as a leading economic educator, he has written textbooks that have been translated into more than a dozen languages.
Akerlof, George