Peter Diamond · Philosophy & Social Sciences
Economist who laid the foundations of search theory — why unemployment and job vacancies coexist — and wrote widely used models of public debt and optimal taxation; Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences 2010
29 April 1940, New York City, New York, United States
New York · New Haven · Cambridge (Massachusetts) · Berkeley
Peter Diamond is recognized among Jewish contributors to Philosophy & Social Sciences — Economist who laid the foundations of search theory — why unemployment and job vacancies coexist — and wrote widely used models of public debt and optimal taxation; Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences 2010
Origins and early life
Peter Arthur Diamond was born in New York City on 29 April 1940 and started school in the Bronx, before his family moved to Woodmere, on Long Island. He was born into a Jewish family whose grandparents had come to America around the turn of the century, his mother's from Poland and his father's from Russia and Romania; his father sold shoes by day while studying law at night. He read mathematics at Yale, graduating summa cum laude in 1960, then switched to economics at MIT and finished his doctorate there under Robert Solow in 1963.
Work and career
After starting his career at Berkeley, he returned to MIT in 1966 and stayed, becoming in 1997 an Institute Professor, the highest honour awarded by its faculty and administration. His 1965 paper on national debt became a widely used model of public debt, and his 1971 papers with James Mirrlees set out which kind of tax system lets an economy reach the greatest production efficiency available to it. The work later honoured in Stockholm began with a 1971 paper applying search theory to a retail market, asking where a market ends up when finding a trading partner takes time, and he then carried the approach to the labour market and to the whole economy.
It explains why unemployment and unfilled vacancies exist side by side, and his co-laureates built on it to show how benefits and hiring rules shape unemployment and wages. From 1974 he also worked on pensions, first on a panel advising the Senate Finance Committee on Social Security financing, and with Peter Orszag he later wrote Saving Social Security: A Balanced Approach.
Recognition
He was president of the American Economic Association in 2003, and the 2010 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences was awarded jointly to him, Dale Mortensen and Christopher Pissarides “for their analysis of markets with search frictions”.
Verify and go deeper with these external references.
Source: Wikipedia — Peter Diamond / NobelPrize.org Economic Sciences 2010
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Economist who laid the foundations of search theory — why unemployment and job vacancies coexist — and wrote widely used models of public debt and optimal taxation; Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences 2010
Source: Wikipedia — Peter Diamond / NobelPrize.org Economic Sciences 2010
