George Akerlof was born in New Haven, Connecticut, on June 17,1940, into a Jewish family.
22 Facts About George Akerlof
2.
George Akerlof's mother was Rosalie Clara Grubber, a housewife of German Jewish descent, and his father was Gosta Carl Akerlof, a chemist and inventor, who was a Swedish immigrant.
3.
George Akerlof has an older brother, Carl, a physics professor at the University of Michigan.
4.
George Akerlof attended Princeton Day School, before he graduated from the Lawrenceville School in 1958.
5.
George Akerlof received a bachelor's in economics from Yale University in 1962, and earned his PhD in economics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1966.
6.
George Akerlof's dissertation was titled Wages and Capital under the supervision of Robert Solow, a noted economist who would later receive the Nobel Memorial Prize.
7.
George Akerlof then became an associate professor at Berkeley and voted for a tenure-track position at the university.
8.
George Akerlof served as a senior economist at the White House Council of Economic Advisers from 1973 to 1974.
9.
In 1977, George Akerlof spent a year as a visiting research economist for the Federal Reserve Board of Governors in Washington, DC where he met his future wife and coauthor, Janet Yellen.
10.
In 1980, George Akerlof becomes Goldman Professor of Economics at Berkeley and taught there for most of his career.
11.
At Washington, George Akerlof began working for the Brookings Institution as a senior fellow.
12.
George Akerlof remained an active faculty member at the university until his retirement.
13.
George Akerlof was awarded Koshland Professor of Economics Emeritus in 2010.
14.
George Akerlof is perhaps best known for his article, "The Market for Lemons: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism", published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics in 1970, in which he identified certain severe problems that afflict markets characterized by asymmetric information, the paper for which he was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize.
15.
George Akerlof proposed a new agenda for macroeconomics, using social norms to explain macroeconomic behavior.
16.
George Akerlof is considered together with Gary Becker as one of the founders of social economics.
17.
George Akerlof is a trustee of Economists for Peace and Security and co-director of the Social Interactions, Identity and Well-Being Program at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research.
18.
George Akerlof is on the advisory board of the Institute for New Economic Thinking.
19.
George Akerlof was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1985.
20.
George Akerlof was briefly married to an architect, Kay Leong; they wedded in 1974 and divorced three years later, after he didn't get promoted to a full professorship at Berkeley.
21.
In 1978, George Akerlof married Janet Yellen, an economist who is the current United States Secretary of the Treasury and former chair of the Federal Reserve, as well as a professor emeritus at Berkeley's Haas School of Business.
22.
Robert George Akerlof is an economist, earned a bachelor's degree in economics and mathematics from Yale University and obtained his PhD in economics from Harvard University, currently working as an associate professor of economics at the University of Warwick.