Edmund Phelps

Edmund Phelps
Phelps in 2017
Born (1933-07-26) July 26, 1933 (age 91)
NationalityAmerican
EducationAmherst College (BA)
Yale University (PhD)
Academic career
FieldMacroeconomics
InstitutionRAND Corporation
Cowles Foundation
University of Pennsylvania
Columbia University
Doctoral
advisor
James Tobin
Arthur Okun
Doctoral
students
Gylfi Zoega
Hian Teck Hoon
InfluencesPaul Samuelson
William Fellner
Thomas Schelling
John Rawls
ContributionsMicrofoundations of macroeconomics
Expectations in wage and price-setting
Natural rate of unemployment
Statistical discrimination
Structural slumps
Imagination in innovating
Golden Rule rate of saving
AwardsNobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, 2006
Chevalier de la Legion d'Honneur, 2008
Pico Mirandola Prize, 2008
Global Economy Prize, 2008
China Friendship Award, 2014
Academic background
ThesisA test for the presence of cost inflation in the united states economy, 1955-1957 (1959)

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

Early in his career, he became known for his research at Yale's Cowles Foundation in the first half of the 1960s on the sources of economic growth. His demonstration of the golden rule savings rate, a concept related to work by John von Neumann, started a wave of research on how much a nation should spend on present consumption rather than save and invest for future generations.

Phelps was at the University of Pennsylvania from 1966 to 1971 and moved to Columbia University in 1971. His most seminal work inserted a microfoundation, one featuring imperfect information, incomplete knowledge and expectations about wages and prices, to support a macroeconomic theory of employment determination and price-wage dynamics. That led to his development of the natural rate of unemployment: its existence and the mechanism governing its size. In the early 2000s, he turned to the study of business innovation.

He is the founding director, since 2001, of Columbia's Center on Capitalism and Society. He was McVickar Professor of Political Economy at Columbia from 1982 to 2021. On January 1, 2022, his title changed to McVickar Professor Emeritus of Political Economy.