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| Edmund Phelps wins Economics Nobel | | |
New York October 09
The Nobel Prize for Economics was awarded to Edmund S. Phelps of the United States, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced on Monday.
The prize - formally called The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel - last year had gone to Robert Aumann of Israel and Thomas Schelling of the United States.
Phelps, 73, professor of political economy at Columbia University in New York, was credited "for his analysis of intertemporal tradeoffs in macroeconomic policy," the academy said, citing his research into the relationship between short-term and long-term effects of economic policy.
Phelps was the sixth US national this year to win a Nobel prize. Last week, Americans Andrew Fire and Craig Mello were awarded the medicine prize, John Mather and George Smoot shared the physics prize and Roger Kornberg was awarded the chemistry prize.
Edmund Phelps joined the Department of Economics at Columbia in 1971 after several years at Pennsylvania and earlier Yale. He was named McVickar Professor of Political Economy in 1982.
During the last 40 years he has published extensively in professional journals. His recent books include "Structural Slumps: The Modern Equilibrium Theory of Employment, Interest and Assets" and "Rewarding Work: How to Restore Participation and Self-Support to Free Enterprise" (both Harvard University Press).
Alongside his interest in the functioning and performance of capitalist institutions, Phelps has also done research on the causes and cures of joblessness.
Phelps's work is best known for introducing in the late '60s an expectations-based microeconomics into the theory of employment determination and price-wage dynamics. Keynes's great work of the '30s had left it unexplained why involuntary unemployment is observed even in the best of times and why a drop of aggregate "effective demand" causes a rise of unemployment - why not a prompt fall of money wages and prices by just enough to forestall a fall of employment? The challenge was to resolve these issues while continuing to posit the elementary rationality that economics traditionally ascribed to workers, consumers and firms.
Born on July 26, 1933 at Evanston, Illinois, Phelps did his graduation from the Amherst College and received his PhD from the Yale University.
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