Philippe Aghion

Origins and early life

Philippe Mario Aghion was born in Paris on 17 August 1956, the son of Gaby Aghion, who founded the fashion house Chloé in 1952, and of Raymond Aghion, who ran a modern art gallery on the boulevard Saint-Germain. Both his parents came from Jewish families of Alexandria, in Egypt, where they had met at primary school at the age of seven, and they settled in Paris in 1945. He grew up among the writers and artists they knew, spending childhood holidays at the house of the poet Tristan Tzara, while Karl Lagerfeld, who designed for Chloé, helped him with his German homework.

Work and career

He studied mathematics at the École normale supérieure de Cachan, took a doctorate in mathematical economics at the University of Paris I in 1983 and a second one at Harvard in 1987. That autumn, a new assistant professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he walked into the office of Peter Howitt, a visitor from Western Ontario, and proposed that they model Joseph Schumpeter's idea of creative destruction.

Their article in Econometrica in 1992 made growth depend on how often innovations arrive and how large they are, each better product pushing out the firms that sold the old one, and showed that the rents rewarding innovators can also let them block newcomers. He then worked at the National Centre for Scientific Research, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, Oxford and University College London, taught at Harvard from 2002 to 2015, and now teaches at the Collège de France, the London School of Economics and, since 2020, INSEAD.

Recognition

He received the Yrjö Jahnsson Award in 2001, the John von Neumann Award in 2009 and, with Howitt, the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in 2020. In 2025 he and Howitt shared one half of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences “for the theory of sustained growth through creative destruction”, the other half going to Joel Mokyr.