Stiglitz, Joseph Eugene (1943-…), is an American economist who won the 2001 Nobel Prize in economic sciences. Stiglitz shared the award with fellow American economists George A. Akerlof and A. Michael Spence for their work in analyzing market systems.
Stiglitz received the Nobel Prize for his pioneering contributions to the field of the economics of information, which stresses the importance of information on market functions. Stiglitz has studied how markets behave when participants have asymmetric information—that is, when people have different types and different amounts of information. He has argued that asymmetric information may lead to market failures, making government intervention necessary in some cases.
Stiglitz was born in Gary, Indiana, on Feb. 9, 1943. He received his bachelor’s degree from Amherst College in 1964 and his doctor’s degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1967. He also studied at Cambridge University in the United Kingdom.
From 1993 to 1997, Stiglitz served on President Bill Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisers. From 1997 to 1999, he served as the chief economist and the vice president of development economics for the World Bank. The World Bank is an international organization that provides loans to governments and private firms for development projects. He resigned from the World Bank in 1999 because of policy disagreements with the bank’s management. Stiglitz became a professor of economics at Columbia University in 2001. He has also taught at Yale University, Oxford University in the United Kingdom, Princeton University, and Stanford University.
