Category:21st-century American economists

When the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded Claudia Goldin the 2023 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for her work on women in the labor market, she became the third woman to receive it, and the latest in a long sequence of American laureates whose careers span the turn of the millennium. The economists grouped here built the dominant frameworks of contemporary economics: search and matching models of labor, mechanism design and auction theory, behavioral finance, the economics of growth and climate, and the empirical revolution in applied microeconomics. Most have spent decades at a small set of research universities and at the Federal Reserve, the Council of Economic Advisers, the Treasury, the IMF, or the World Bank.

Background

American economics in the 21st century inherited the postwar institutions that made the United States the discipline's center of gravity. By the 1990s the leading PhD programs at MIT, Harvard, Chicago, Stanford, Princeton, Berkeley, Yale, and Northwestern produced the bulk of tenure-track hires worldwide, and the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) coordinated the working-paper economy that defines the field's research front.

The intellectual landscape of the period has been shaped by several overlapping developments. The rational-expectations program that began in the 1970s matured into the workhorse dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models used by central banks. Game theory and mechanism design moved from abstract foundations to practical tools for designing auctions, matching markets, and online platforms. The "credibility revolution" in applied microeconomics, driven by quasi-experimental methods and access to administrative data, reoriented labor, public, and development economics around causal identification.

The global financial crisis of 2007 to 2009 and the COVID-19 recession of 2020 placed macroeconomists at the center of policy debates over monetary stimulus, financial regulation, fiscal policy, and inequality. Climate change, antitrust enforcement against digital platforms, and the rise of China gave economists new subjects and renewed the older tradition of public-facing economic commentary.

Notable members

The category includes a heavy concentration of Nobel laureates whose recognized contributions cover most of the field's major branches. In macroeconomics and monetary theory, Robert Lucas Jr., Edward Prescott, and Thomas Sargent formalized rational expectations and real business cycle theory, while Lars Peter Hansen developed the generalized method of moments that made empirical testing of those models possible. Paul Krugman received the prize for new trade theory and economic geography and became one of the most widely read commentators on macroeconomic policy through his New York Times column.

Labor economics is represented by Dale Mortensen, whose search-and-matching framework, developed with Peter Diamond and Christopher Pissarides, remains the standard model of unemployment, and by Peter Diamond himself, whose work also spans public finance and social insurance. Claudia Goldin reconstructed the long-run history of women's participation in the American labor force using newly assembled data series. Raj Chetty represents a younger generation of empirical economists using linked tax records to study intergenerational mobility, neighborhood effects, and the long-run consequences of education.

Game theory and market design account for an unusually large share of the group. Eric Maskin and Roger Myerson shared the 2007 prize with Leonid Hurwicz for the foundations of mechanism design. Lloyd Shapley was recognized for the theory of stable allocations and cooperative game theory, work that underlies the matching algorithms used in medical residency assignment and school choice. Paul Milgrom received the 2020 prize with Robert Wilson for auction theory and its application to spectrum auctions and other large-scale market designs. Thomas Schelling, whose 2005 prize cited his analysis of conflict and cooperation, worked in a more verbal tradition that influenced nuclear strategy as much as economics.

Institutional and growth economics is represented by Douglass North, a founder of the new economic history and a theorist of institutions, Oliver Williamson, whose work on transaction costs reshaped the theory of the firm, and Paul Romer, whose endogenous growth theory placed ideas and human capital at the center of long-run development. Daron Acemoglu, with James Robinson and Simon Johnson, extended the institutional approach into a comparative theory of long-run political economy.

Finance includes Harry Markowitz, whose mean-variance portfolio theory predates the period but who remained active well into the 21st century, and Robert Shiller, whose work on asset price volatility, behavioral finance, and housing markets gave him a public profile around the dot-com and housing bubbles. William Nordhaus received the 2018 prize for integrating climate change into long-run macroeconomic analysis through his DICE model.

Policy-facing economists in the group include Lawrence Summers, former Treasury Secretary and Harvard president, Kenneth Rogoff, former chief economist of the IMF and co-author of widely cited work on sovereign debt and financial crises, Jason Furman, who chaired the Council of Economic Advisers under President Obama, and George Akerlof, whose 2001 prize for asymmetric information was followed by influential work with Robert Shiller on the psychological foundations of macroeconomics.

Institutional homes and public roles

The career arcs in this group are remarkably consistent. Doctoral training is concentrated at MIT, Harvard, Chicago, Stanford, Princeton, Berkeley, Yale, and Carnegie Mellon. Faculty appointments cluster at the same institutions, with extended stints at the Hoover Institution, the Brookings Institution, the Peterson Institute for International Economics, and the NBER. The Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis incubated much of the rational-expectations program; the Cowles Foundation at Yale and the Department of Economics at Chicago hosted long-running traditions in econometrics, finance, and price theory.

Public service is the norm rather than the exception. Members of the category have served on the Council of Economic Advisers under presidents of both parties, as Treasury Secretary or Deputy Secretary, as chief economist at the IMF or World Bank, and as advisers to foreign governments. Several have testified before Congress on monetary policy, tax reform, climate policy, and antitrust, and a number write regular columns or books aimed at general audiences.

Recognition

The density of Nobel laureates within this category reflects both the discipline's American center of gravity and the fact that the prize, established in 1969, often honors work done decades earlier. John Bates Clark Medals, awarded by the American Economic Association to economists under 40 working in the United States, mark many of these careers as well, including those of Acemoglu, Chetty, and Goldin. Fellowships in the Econometric Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, presidencies of the American Economic Association, and membership in the National Academy of Sciences appear repeatedly in the biographies collected here.