Joseph E. Stiglitz – 2001 Nobel Laureate in Economics, former Chief Economist of the World Bank, Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers to the US President. Joseph E. Stiglitz took over as Chief Economist of the World Bank in February 1997, a position he held until January 2000.
Joseph E. Stiglitz was born in Gary, Indiana (USA) in 1934. He attended Amherst College and received his doctorate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1967. In 1970, he took up a full professorship at Yale and in 1979 was awarded the John Bates Clark Award, which is presented every two years by the American Economic Association to the most deserving economist under 40.
In 2001, he received the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for his analyses of markets with asymmetric information.
His academic career has taken him to Princeton, Stanford and MIT, and as Drummond Professor and academic researcher at All Souls College, Oxford. He is currently Professor and Chairman of the Committee on Global Thought at Columbia University in New York. He is also co-founder and chairman of the Initiative for Policy Dialogue.
From 1993-95, Stiglitz was a member of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Clinton, becoming its chairman from 1995-97. He was Chief Economist and Vice President of the World Bank from 1997-2000.
Joseph E. Stiglitz was the main author of the 1995 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, which was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007.
In 2008, Stiglitz took over the chairmanship of the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress, a working group to improve the measurement of economic performance and social progress, which was initiated by French President Nicolas Sarkozy. Its final report was presented in September 2009. In the same year, he was appointed by the President of the United Nations General Assembly as Chairman of the Commission of Experts on the Reform of the International Financial and Monetary System, which also presented its final report in September.
Joseph E. Stiglitz also holds a lectureship at the University of Manchester as Chairman of the Board and Director of the summer programs for advanced students at the Brooks World Poverty Institute there. He also serves on a number of other boards, including the Board of Trustees of Amherst College and Resources for the Future.
Joseph Stiglitz is a co-founder of “information economics” as a branch of economics, which researches the consequences of asymmetric market information and has developed pioneering key concepts such as “adverse selection” and “moral hazard”, which are now standard methods not only among theorists but also among analysts of political processes. He has made important contributions to research in the fields of macroeconomics, monetary theory, development economics, financial theory and industrial economics, as well as welfare economics and the distribution of income and wealth. In the 1980s, he contributed to the revival of economic interest in research and development programs.
His research has contributed to a better understanding of adverse market developments and how selective government intervention can improve market performance.
Joseph E. Stiglitz is recognized worldwide as an outstanding economic educator and has written textbooks that have been translated into more than a dozen languages. The Journal of Economic Perspectives, one of the leading economic journals, was founded by Stiglitz. His work “Globalization and Its Discontents” (W.W. Norton, June 2001) has been published in over 35 languages, at least two versions exist as illegal reprints, and has sold at least one million copies worldwide in the authorized edition. His other recent publications include “The roaring nineties. The disenchanted boom.” (The Roaring Nineties, W.W. Norton), “Towards a New Paradigm in Monetary Economics” (Cambridge University Press) with Bruce Greenwald, “Fair trade. Agenda for a just world trade.” (Fair Trade for All, Oxford University Press) with Andrew Charlton and “The Opportunities of Globalization.” (Making Globalization Work, WW Norton and Penguin/Allen Lane, September 2006).
His latest publication to date, “The true cost of war. Economic and Political Consequences of the Iraq Conflict.” (The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict) with Linda Bilmes of Harvard University, was published in March 2008 by WW Norton and Penguin/Allen Lane. In 2010, his book entitled “In Free Fall. From the Failure of Markets to the Reorganization of the World Economy” (Freefall: America, Free Markets, and the Sinking of the World Economy).