George Akerlof

Origins and early life

George Arthur Akerlof was born in New Haven, Connecticut, on 17 June 1940, the younger son of Gösta Åkerlöf, a chemist from Sweden, and of Rosalie Hirschfelder, who had met him as a chemistry student at Yale.

Work and career

His mother's parents were both, in his own words, of German Jewish descent, an ancestry that he wrote had cost his grandfather tenure at Johns Hopkins, where he had set up the first cardiology clinic in the United States. The family followed his father's work to Pittsburgh, Washington and Princeton, and he left the Lawrenceville School in 1958, took his degree at Yale in 1962 and his doctorate at MIT in 1966 under Robert Solow.

In his first year as an assistant professor at Berkeley he wrote The Market for Lemons, which editors rejected as trivial before the Quarterly Journal of Economics printed it in 1970: when sellers of used cars know more than buyers, he showed, good cars are driven out and the market can wither. He spent a year from 1967 at the Indian Statistical Institute in New Delhi, and in 1977, at the Federal Reserve Board, met the economist Janet Yellen, whom he married in June 1978.

After two years at the London School of Economics they returned in 1980 to Berkeley, where he became Goldman Professor of Economics, and for ten years they wrote together, first on efficiency wages: workers who feel fairly paid work better.

Recognition

With Rachel Kranton he later brought social identity into economic theory, from an article in 2000, and his use of psychology, sociology and anthropology gave him, the Nobel Foundation says, an important part in the rise of behavioural economics. He shared the 2001 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with Michael Spence and Joseph Stiglitz “for their analyses of markets with asymmetric information”. He became Koshland Professor emeritus at Berkeley in 2010 and has taught since 2014 at Georgetown University in Washington.