Joseph E. Stiglitz is University Professor at Columbia University in New York. 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. Prof. Stiglitz is the Co-Founder and Co-President of the Initiative for Policy Dialogue at Columbia and Chief Economist of the Roosevelt Institute. In 2001, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics for his analyses of markets with asymmetric information, and he was a lead author of the 1995 Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. He was a member of the Council of Economic Advisers during the Clinton administration, and served as CEA chairman (1995–97). He then became Chief Economist and Senior Vice-President of the World Bank from 1997–2000. In 2008 he was asked by the French President Nicolas Sarkozy to chair the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress. He also chairs a High Level Expert Group at the OECD on these topics. In 2009 he was appointed by the President of the United Nations General Assembly as chair of the Commission of Experts on Reform of the International Financial and Monetary System (The Stiglitz Report). Prof. 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. He has made major contributions to macroeconomics and monetary theory, development economics and trade theory, public and corporate finance, theories of industrial organization and rural organization, and theories of welfare economics and income and wealth distribution.

Ph. Credits: G. Plump