Pissarides, Christopher Antoniou (1948-…), a Cypriot-born British economist, won the 2010 Nobel Prize in economic sciences. He shared the award with the American economists Peter A. Diamond and Dale T. Mortensen. They received the award for their work in markets with search friction. A market is a setting in which people trade goods, services, or resources. Markets with search friction are complex ones in which it is especially difficult to match buyers and sellers.
A labor market is a type of market with search friction. Search friction in such markets can be created by mismatches between workers’ skills and the skills businesses need or such policies as unemployment insurance. Traditional economic theory of supply and demand would predict that in a time of high unemployment, if an economy also had a large number of job openings, wages for workers would drop until companies began to hire and the open jobs were filled. The friction in a labor market, however, can keep people unemployed even when firms are looking for workers.
The work of Pissarides, Mortensen, and Diamond studied why more complex markets do not behave according to traditional theories. They created a mathematical model—the Diamond-Mortensen-Pissarides (DMP) model—to study these complex markets. The DMP model is used to study housing, labor, and other markets in which buyers and sellers cannot be easily matched.
Pissarides was born in Nicosia, Cyprus, on Feb. 20, 1948. He received a bachelor’s degree in economics in 1970 and a master’s degree, also in economics, in 1971 from the University of Essex in the United Kingdom. In 1973, he earned a doctor’s degree in economics from the London School of Economics. After working for the Central Bank of Cyprus in 1974, he taught economics at the University of Southampton in the United Kingdom from 1974 to 1976. He began teaching economics at the London School of Economics in 1976.
