32 Facts About Edmund Phelps

Edmund Strother Phelps was born on July 26,1933 and is an American economist and the recipient of the 2006 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.

Edmund Phelps is the founding director, since 2001, of Columbia's Center on Capitalism and Society.

Edmund Phelps was McVickar Professor of Political Economy at Columbia from 1982 to 2021.

Edmund Phelps was born on July 26,1933, in Evanston, Illinois, and he moved with his family to Hastings-on-Hudson, New York when he was six, where he spent his school years.

At his father's advice, Edmund Phelps enrolled in his first economics course in his second year at Amherst.

Edmund Phelps was strongly impressed with the possibility of applying formal analysis to business.

Edmund Phelps quickly became aware of an important unsolved problem with the existing economic theory and the existing gap between microeconomics and macroeconomics.

Edmund Phelps was strongly influenced by William Fellner whose course emphasized the expectations of agents.

However, feeling he could not pursue macroeconomics at RAND, Edmund Phelps decided to return to the academic world.

Edmund Phelps wrote papers dealing with other areas of economic theory, such as monetary economics or Ricardian equivalence and its relation to optimal growth.

Edmund Phelps was able to collaborate with other top economists working on growth theory, including David Cass and fellow Nobelist Tjalling Koopmans.

In 1966, Edmund Phelps left Yale and moved to the University of Pennsylvania to take up a tenured position as a professor of economics.

At Penn, Edmund Phelps's research focused mainly on the link between employment, wage setting and inflation, leading to his influential 1968 paper "Money-Wage Dynamics and Labor Market Equilibrium" and others.

In January 1969, Edmund Phelps organized a conference at Penn in support of the research on the microfoundations of inflation and employment determination.

Discussions with fellow Nobel prize winners Amartya Sen and Kenneth Arrow and especially the influence of the philosophy of John Rawls, whom he met during the year at the Center, led Edmund Phelps to undertake some research outside macroeconomics.

Edmund Phelps published research on economic justice, applying ideas from Rawls's A Theory of Justice.

In 1971, Phelps moved to the Economics Department at Columbia University, which included future Nobel prize winners William Vickrey and James J Heckman, as well as Phoebus Dhrymes, Guillermo Calvo and John B Taylor.

In 1972, Edmund Phelps published a new book which focused on the derivation of policy implications of his new theory.

Edmund Phelps became interested in the puzzle of the persistent high unemployment in Europe despite no pause in inflation and published on the subject with Jean-Paul Fitoussi.

Edmund Phelps published partial research results in a 1994 book, Structural Slumps: The Modern Equilibrium Theory of Employment, Interest and Assets.

Edmund Phelps collaborated closely with Luigi Paganetto at the University of Rome Tor Vergata and, between 1988 and 1998, as co-organizers of the Villa Mondragone International Seminar.

In 1990 Edmund Phelps took part in a mission from the new EBRD to Moscow, where he and Kenneth Arrow designed a proposal for the reform of the Soviet Union.

From his work at EBRD and collaboration with his former student, Roman Frydman, Edmund Phelps developed a strong interest in Eastern Europe's transition economies.

Edmund Phelps's papers develop the thesis that the great economic swings experienced by the West in the past century not only originate in non-monetary shocks but operate fundamentally by non-monetary mechanisms.

Edmund Phelps published in 1997 a book for the general public, Rewarding Work about the causes and cures of the joblessness and low wages among disadvantaged workers.

Edmund Phelps conducted research with a focus on the Italian economy as Senior Advisor to Italy in Europe of the Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche from 1997 to 2000.

In 2008, writing in the wake of the Great Recession, Edmund Phelps criticized the "false" models of neoclassical economics, but he wrote with skepticism regarding Keynesian resurgence:.

Edmund Phelps told his friend Friedrich Hayek he intended to re-examine his theory in his next book.

Edmund Phelps severely criticizes the economic policy of US president Donald Trump.

In 1981 Edmund Phelps was elected to become a member of the National Academy of Science in the USA.

Furthermore, Edmund Phelps received honorary degrees from several renowned institutions acknowledging his academic work.

Edmund Phelps holds honorary doctorates from the Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Paris, the University of Buenos Aires, Tsinghua University, and the Universite libre de Bruxelles.