Joseph E. Stiglitz

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Joseph E. Stiglitz born February 9, 1943, Gary, Indiana, U.S., is an American economist who shared the The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2001 (a.k.a imprecisely Nobel Prize for Economics) in 2001 "for laying the foundations for the theory of markets with asymmetric information" with A. Michael Spence and George A. Akerlof.

Stiglitz studied at Amherst College (B.A., 1964) in Massachusetts and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Ph.D., 1967). The particular style of MIT economics suited him well - simple and concrete models, directed at answering important and relevant questions. He was awarded a Fulbright fellowship to Cambridge for 1965-1966. Stiglitz taught at several universities, including Yale, Harvard, and Stanford. He was a member of President Bill Clinton's economic policy team; a member of the U.S. Council of Economic Advisers (1993–97), of which he became chairman in June 1995; and senior vice president and chief economist of the World Bank (1997–2000). In 2001 Stiglitz became professor of economics, business, and international affairs at Columbia University in New York. Stiglitz has made seminal and fundamental contributions to every subfield of economic theory – microeconomics, macroeconomics, industrial organization, international economics, labor economics, financial economics and development economics. He has published more than 300 papers, as well as a dozen books, in a 35-year career.

The Prize

The Academy noted that Stiglitz "clarified the opposite type of market adjustment, where poorly informed agents extract information from the better informed, such as the screening performed by insurance companies dividing customers into risk classes by offering a menu of contracts where higher deductibles can be exchanged for significantly lower premiums. In a number of contributions about different markets, Stiglitz has shown that asymmetric information can provide the key to understanding many observed market phenomena, including unemployment and credit rationing."

(...)Market economies are characterized by a high degree of imperfections (...) Older models assumed perfect information, but even small degrees of information imperfections can have large economic consequences. Our models took into account asymmetries of information, which is another way of saying 'Some people know more than others. (...) Our global system is characterized by a lot of inequities (...) It seems increasingly important to try to redress these inequities. (...) Joseph E. Stiglitz at a press conference held at Columbia.

Stiglitz comments that "economics can make a difference" in improving peoples lifes by "focusing on the difference between the haves and have-nots."

Stiglitz is correct in his claim that "competitive economies failed to produce efficient outcomes essentially wherever information was imperfect of markets were incomplete... that is, always."

External Links

• Joseph E. Stiglitz Homepage at Columbia University

• Autobiography, Joseph E. Stiglitz

Publications by Stiglitz

• STIGLITZ, Joseph E. There is no invisible hand. London: The Guardian Comment, December 20, 2002.

• STIGLITZ, Joseph E. Samuelson and the Factor Bias of Technological Change: Toward a Unified Theory of Growth and Unemployment. in Samuelsonian Economics and the Twenty-First Century, Michael Szenberg, et al. eds., Oxford University Press, pp. 235-251.

• More Instruments and Broader Goals: Moving toward the Post-Washington Consensus, in WIDER Perspectives on Global Development, United Nations University–World Institute for Development Economics Research (ed.), Houndmills: Palgrave MacMillan, 2005, pp.16-48 (From the 1998 WIDER Annual Lecture, January 1998.)

• Making Globalization Work ISBN 0-393-06122-1, Penguin Books, August 2006.

• Stability with Growth: Macroeconomics, Liberalization, and Development ISBN 0-19-928814-3 (Initiative for Policy Dialogue Series C); by Joseph E. Stiglitz, Jose Antonio Ocampo, Shari Spiegel, Ricardo Ffrench-Davis, and Deepak Nayyar; Oxford University Press 2006

• Whither Socialism? (Wicksell Lectures), MIT Press, January 1996.

• Frontiers of Development Economics: The Future in Perspective, edited with Gerald M. Meier, World Bank, May 2000.

• New Ideas About Old Age Security: Toward Sustainable Pension Systems in the 21st Century , edited with Robert Holzmann, World Bank, January 2001.

• Principles of Macroeconomics, Third Edition, with Carl E. Walsh, W.W. Norton & Company, March 2002.

• Economics, Third Edition, with Carl E. Walsh, W.W. Norton & Company, April 2002.

• Peasants Versus City-Dwellers: Taxation and the Burden of Economic Development, with Raaj K. Sah, Oxford University Press, April 2002.

• Globalization and Its Discontents, W.W. Norton & Company, June 2002.

• Towards a New Paradigm in Monetary Economics, with Bruce Greenwald, Cambridge University Press, forthcoming in May 2003.

• The Roaring Nineties, W.W. Norton & Company, forthcoming in October 2003.
• Video presentation

• Fair Trade for All: How Trade Can Promote Development (Initiative for Policy Dialogue Series C) -- by Joseph E. Stiglitz, Andrew Charlton; Hardcover

• Economics of the Public Sector by Joseph E. Stiglitz

• The Rebel Within: Joseph Stiglitz and the World Bank by Joseph E. Stiglitz (Editor), Ha-Joon Chang (Editor), ISBN 1-898855-91-9, Anthem Press, Wimbledon Publishing Company (Paperback - February 25, 2002)

• The Development Round Of Trade Negotiations In The Aftermath Of Cancun by Joseph E. Stiglitz, Andrew Charlton (Paperback - January 30, 2005)

• A Chance For The World Bank by Joseph P Stiglitz (Foreword), Jozef Ritzen, ISBN 1-84331-162-3, Anthem Press, Wimbledon Publishing Company (Paperback - May 30, 2005)

• Readings in the Modern Theory of Economic Growth by Joseph E. Stiglitz (Editor), Hirofumi Uzawa (Editor)

• The World Bank Research Observer: No 2: August 1996 by Joseph Stiglitz

• Credit Rationing in Markets with Imperfect Information, The American Economic Review, Vol. 71, No.3 (June 1981),pp.393-410, by Joseph E. Stiglitz and Andrew Weiss

• Online access to STIGLITZ published papers at his website

• Partial list