George Akerlof
Koshland Professor of Economics, University of California, Berkeley.
Contributor Biography
George Akerlof was born on June 17, 1940, in New Haven, Connecticut. Akerlof received his Bachelor’s degree from Yale in 1962, and his Ph.D. in economics from MIT in 1966. It was during these years that Akerlof began conducting his extensive research in Keynesian macroeconomics.
After graduating, Akerlof became an assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley. During his first year at Berkeley that, he wrote “The Market for Lemons: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism,” in which he coined the term “lemon” for a car with hidden defects. In 1967-68, Akerlof spent a year at the Indian Statistical Institute in New Delhi. There he attempted to develop a program to evenly allocate water from the nearby dam. He also continued his research on unemployment and the gaps between supply and demand.
In 1969, after returning from India, Akerlof was granted tenure and joined the faculty in Berkelye’s Department of Economics. In 1977, he moved to Washington, D.C. to work for the Federal Reserve Board in Washington, D.C., where he met Janet Yellon. In Efficiency Wage Models of the Labor Market, Akerlof and coauthor Janet Yellen (who he later married) propose rationales for the efficiency wage hypothesis in which employers pay above the market-clearing wage, in contradiction to the conclusions of neoclassical economics.
Akerlof spent time at the London School of Economics, before returning to Berkeley in 1980. Akerlof decided to change his focus in research from macroeconomics to studying the fairness and social customs of unemployment. From 1994 to 1999, Akerlof moved back to Washington, D.C., becase his wife had been named to the Board of Govenors of the Federal Reserve System. Akerlof and his wife returned to Berkeley in 1999, and since then Akerloff has served as the Koshland Professor of Economics.
Akerlof received the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2001, along with Michael Spence and Joseph Lemons, for their contribution to the theory of information asymmetries. Together, they researched screening, a technique used by one economic agent to extract otherwise private information from another.
