Joseph Stiglitz

Joseph Stiglitz’s Key Accomplishments Include . . .
One of today’s most distinguished and controversial economists, Joseph Stiglitz was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2001 for his work on asymmetric information and is widely acknowledged as one of the pioneers in the field of modern information economics and more generally for his contributions to microeconomics.

Joseph E. Stiglitz is University Professor at Columbia University where he founded the Initiative for Policy Dialogue in 2000. Professor Stiglitz was Chair of President Bill Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisors from 1995-97 and Chief Economist and Senior Vice-President of the World Bank from 1997-2000. Joseph Stiglitz is also chair of the University of Manchester’s Brooks World Poverty Institute and is a member of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences. In 2008, Joseph Stiglitz was appointed by French President Nicolas Sarkozy to chair a Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Economic Progress.

Joseph Stiglitz’s best known recent publications include The Three Trillion Dollar War, Making Globalization Work, Fair Trade for All, Globalization and its Discontents and The Roaring Nineties.

Joseph E. Stiglitz was born in Gary, Indiana. 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.” Professor Stiglitz has taught at Princeton, Stanford, MIT and was the Drummond Professor and a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. Joseph Stiglitz is now University Professor at Columbia University and Chair of Columbia University’s Committee on Global Thought. He is also the co-founder and Executive Director of the Initiative for Policy Dialogue at Columbia. 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.

More About Joseph Stiglitz…
Joseph 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, Professor Stiglitz helped revive interest in the economics of R&D. 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, Joseph Stiglitz has written textbooks that have been translated into more than a dozen languages. Professor Stiglitz also founded one of the leading economics journals, The Journal of Economic Perspectives. His book Globalization and Its Discontents has been translated into 35 languages, and has sold more than one million copies worldwide. Other books include The Roaring Nineties, Towards a New Paradigm in Monetary Economics with Bruce Greenwald, Fair Trade for All with Andrew Charlton, and Making Globalization Work. His most recent book is The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict, with Linda Bilmes of Harvard University.