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Joseph E. Stiglitz
Professor, Columbia Business School, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences
(Department of Economics) and the School of International and Public Affairs

Joseph E. Stiglitz was born in Gary, Indiana in 1943. A graduate of Amherst
College, he received his PHD from MIT in 1967, became a full professor at Yale
in 1970, and in 1979 was awarded the John Bates Clark Award, given biennially
by the American Economic Association to the economist under 40 who has made
the most significant contribution to the field. He has taught at Princeton, Stanford,
MIT, and was the Drummond Professor and a fellow of All Souls College,
Oxford. He is now University Professor at Columbia University in New York and
Chair of Columbia University's Committee on Global Thought. He is also the cofounder and Executive Director of the Initiative for Policy Dialogue at Columbia.
In 2001, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics for his analyses of markets
with asymmetric information, and he was a lead author of the 1995 Report of the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which shared the 2007 Nobel Peace
Prize.
Dr. Stiglitz was a member of the Council of Economic Advisers from 1993-95,
during the Clinton administration, and served as CEA chairman from 1995-97. He
then became Chief Economist and Senior Vice-President of the World Bank from
1997-2000. In 2008, he was appointed by French President Nicolas Sarkozy to
chair a Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and
Economic Progress. He is also chair of the Commission of Experts of the
President of the UN General Assembly on Reforms of the International Monetary
and Financial System.
Dr. Stiglitz holds a part-time appointment at the University of Manchester as
Chair of the Management Board and Director of Graduate Summer Programs at
the Brooks World Poverty Institute. He serves on numerous other boards,
including Amherst College's Board of Trustees and Resources for the Future.
Dr. Stiglitz helped create a new branch of economics, "The Economics of
Information," exploring the consequences of information asymmetries and
pioneering such pivotal concepts as adverse selection and moral hazard, which
have now become standard tools not only of theorists, but of policy analysts. He
has made major contributions to macro-economics and monetary theory, to
development economics and trade theory, to public and corporate finance, to the
theories of industrial organization and rural organization, and to the theories of
welfare economics and of income and wealth distribution. In the 1980s, he helped
revive interest in the economics of R&D.
His work has helped explain the circumstances in which markets do not work
well, and how selective government intervention can improve their performance.
Recognized around the world as a leading economic educator, he has written

textbooks that have been translated into more than a dozen languages. He founded
one of the leading economics journals, The Journal of Economic Perspectives.
His book Globalization and Its Discontents (W.W. Norton June 2001) has been
translated into 35 languages, besides at least two pirated editions, and in the nonpirated editions has sold more than one million copies worldwide. Other recent
books include The Roaring Nineties (W.W. Norton), Towards a New Paradigm in
Monetary Economics (Cambridge University Press) with Bruce Greenwald, Fair
Trade for All (Oxford University Press), with Andrew Charlton, and Making
Globalization Work, (WW Norton and Penguin/ Allen Lane, September 2006).
His most recent book, The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq
Conflict, with Linda Bilmes of Harvard University, was published in March 2008
by WW Norton and Penguin/ Allen Lane. He is currently working on a book
entitled, Freefall: America, Free Markets, and the Sinking of the World Economy,
to be published January 2010 by WW Norton and Penguin/ Allen Lane.