About us
Joseph E. Stiglitz holds joint professorships at Columbia University’s Economics Department, School of International and Public Affairs, and its Business School. From 1997 to 2000, he served as the World Bank’s Senior Vice President for Development Economics and Chief Economist. From 1993 to 1997, Dr. Stiglitz served as a member and then as the Chairman of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers and as a member of the President’s cabinet. He was first appointed Professor of Economics at Yale University in 1969 at the age of 26. He held the Drummond Chair in Political Economy at All Souls College, Oxford, and has also taught at Princeton and Stanford Universities and been a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.
Dr. Stiglitz earned his B.A. from Amherst College in 1964, his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1967, and was a Fulbright Scholar and Tapp Junior Research Fellow at Cambridge University.
As an academic, Dr. Stiglitz helped create a new branch of economics—“The Economics of Information”—which has been widely applied throughout the economics discipline. Dr. Stiglitz helped pioneer pivotal concepts such as theories of adverse selection and moral hazard, which have now become the standard tools of policy analysts as well as economic theorists. In 2001, Dr. Stiglitz was awarded the Nobel Prize for his work in this area.
Dr. Stiglitz has also made seminal contributions in several other areas. During the late 1970s and early 1980s, Dr. Stiglitz helped revive interest in the economics of technological change and other factors contributing to long-term increases in productivity and living standards.
Dr. Stiglitz is a leading scholar in the economics of the public sector. Both his graduate textbook, co-authored with Anthony B. Atkinson, and his undergraduate textbook have been leading texts in the subject throughout the world for the past decade, with translations in German, Spanish, Italian, Japanese, French, Chinese, Latvian, Ukrainian, Russian, and Turkish.
Building on his work on the economics of information, Dr. Stiglitz has been instrumental in developing new macro-economic theories (a strand of what is sometimes called “New Keynesian Economics”), including new theories of monetary economics, emphasizing the role of credit.
His reformulation of development theory has had profound effects on practice, particularly at the World Bank, as well as on theory, particularly in the creation of the modern theory of rural organization He has also made major contributions to the theory of income distribution, the theory of corporate finance, the theory of uncertainty, the theory of industrial organization, and the theory of economic growth.
More recently, Professor Stiglitz has combined his practical experiences at the World Bank and in the Clinton Administration with his theoretical expertise to become an active commentator on current economic developments, such as the New Economy and Globalization. His forthcoming book Globalization and Its Discontents is being translated into German, French, Dutch, Spanish, Italian, and Japanese. He writes a syndicated column which is published in dozens of newspapers in Europe, Latin America, Eastern Europe and elsewhere in the developing world.
In 1979, the American Economic Association awarded Dr. Stiglitz its biennial John Bates Clark Award, which is given to the economist under 40 who has made the most significant contributions to economics. His award citation reads in part: “Dr. Stiglitz is beyond compare among younger economists for the range and variety of his theoretical achievements, as well as for their vigor and their liveliness. From growth and capital to the economics of discrimination, from public finance to corporate finance, from information to uncertainty, from competitive equilibrium with exhaustible resources to monopolistic competition and product diversity, contemporary economic theory is crisscrossed with his footprints.”
Dr. Stiglitz’s academic accomplishments have been nationally acclaimed through this election as fellow to the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Econometric Society, and the American Philosophical Society. Dr. Stiglitz has received international recognition through his election as a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy and as the recipient of the Italian Academia Lincei’s International Prize, the French UAP’s Scientific Prize, and the German Recktenwald Prize. Dr. Stiglitz has also been presented with more than fifteen honorary doctorates from universities in Asia, Europe, America, and Latin America.
Dr. Stiglitz has served on the executive committee of the American Economic Association from 1979 and as its Vice President. He is also the Founding Editor of the American Economic Association’s Journal of Economic Perspectives, a journal designed to make economic ideas both more accessible and more relevant to the public. He has served as editor and on the editorial boards of a large number of other economics journals.
Dr. Stiglitz has a reputation as one of the country’s leading economic educators. At Stanford University he taught the introductory Principles of Economics course as well as graduate courses in macroeconomics, microeconomics, the economics of the public sector, financial economics, and the economics of organizations. His textbooks have been translated into more than a dozen languages. Many of his former Ph.D. students now teach at universities throughout the world and have played a prominent role in economic policy, including the President of Yale, the former Dean of Stanford University, the past Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, previous Chief Economists of the Federal Communications Commission and the Department of Justice, and the finance ministers and central bank governors of several countries. Dr. Stiglitz has also served on the American Economic Association’s Commission on Graduate Education in Economics.
Dr. Stiglitz’s previous positions also include working as a consultant for several of America’s largest corporations, a number of states, and several international organizations.
During his tenure at the Council of Economic Advisors, Dr. Stiglitz was a key member of President Clinton’s economic team, where he was involved not only in macroeconomic, but also in microeconomic and international economic policymaking. He was a leader in the Administration’s “reinventing government” efforts, including the proposals for pension simplification, corporatization of the air traffic control system, the Department of Housing and Urban Development reorganization, a comprehensive natural disaster policy, new treasury securities (indexed bonds), and reform of telecommunications, banking, and environmental regulations.
In addition, Dr. Stiglitz has written extensively on the important but limited role the government should play in the economy. He is a leading advocate of the “market failures” approach that attempts to delineate those areas—such as the environment, public health and safety, and research—where the unfettered market may lead to inefficient outcomes and where cost effective government remedies may be developed.
He has also a long-standing concern over the factors that contribute to rapid economic growth and economic stability, and the interplay between growth and distribution, beginning with his Ph.D. dissertation, growing through his reviving interest in technological progress in the 1980s and continuing through to his more recent studies of the East Asian miracle and crisis.
At the World Bank, Dr. Stiglitz spearheaded efforts to reassess development strategies, with marked changes in the development policies recommended by the Bank and in aid strategies pursued by it and other donor agencies. Among the changes were a move away from the so-called Washington consensus policies which had dominated policy-making for almost two decades to a more balanced view of the role of the state, an increased emphasis on the role of knowledge in development, an increased concern for equality and the interrelations between equality and growth, and an increased awareness of the importance of imperfections in competition, information, and markets more generally.
In the recent global financial crisis, Dr. Stiglitz was active in devising and advocating strategies that would reduce the magnitude of the economic downturn and the adverse effects on the poor and that would accelerate the recovery of the affected economies. He has been a leading participant in the international debate on redesigning the global financial architecture, focusing on reducing the vulnerability of developing countries to devastating financial shocks. Dr. Stiglitz also led a re-examination of the strategies for transition of the former Communist economies to a market-based system.
Dr. Stiglitz is currently engaged in establishing the Initiative for Policy Dialogue, a multidisciplinary, multi-institutional, multi-country joint venture, centered around Columbia University, to help promote democratic development and encourage policy dialogue in critical areas of economics within developing countries. The Initiative has already received substantial support from both foundations and governments and works together with international organizations such as the UN Development Program. The Initiative has created international task forces to re-examine key areas of economic policy, such as pension reform, capital market liberalization, decentralization, and macro-economic policy, has conducted country dialogues in a diverse set of countries, including Viet Nam, Serbia, and Nigeria. It also has a journalism program, aimed at enhancing general economic literacy in developing countries.
Dr. Stiglitz’s current research interests span the areas in which he has already made numerous contributions. In the area of the economics of the public sector, these include a re-examination of the role of government in light of the changing structure of the economy, the processes of globalization and devolution, and new insights into how to improve the efficiency and transparency of the public sector. In monetary economics, he has recently completed book (with Bruce Greenwald), which, among other things, analyzes how monetary policy affects economic activity through the credit mechanism and explore the implications of changes in financial markets for the design and effectiveness of monetary policy. In international economics, his recent research has focused on the implications of globalization for development strategies and the redesign of the international economics institutions.
Dr. Stiglitz serves on the boards of several organizations, including Amherst College, the Folger Shakespeare Library, Economists Coalition for Arms Reduction, and Resources for the Future, and on the advisory boards of numerous academic, private, and public bodies, including the for International Economics. He is also Chairman of the Board of the Brookdale Group, LLC, which specializes in investing in emerging markets and economies in transition, and is a member of the board of the Kazakhstan Investment Fund.
Dr. Stiglitz grew up in Indiana, in the same steel-making town that produced several prominent economists, including Paul Samuelson.