Edmund S. Phelps

Professor, Columbia University; 2006 Nobel Laureate in Economics Scholars

Edmund Phelps is the winner of the 2006 Nobel Prize in Economics, Director of the Center on Capitalism and Society at Columbia University. Born in 1933 in Evanston, Illinois, Edmund Phelps earned his B.A. from Amherst in 1955 and his Ph.D. from Yale in 1959. His career began at the RAND Corporation. From 1960-1966 he held appointments at Yale and its Cowles Foundation, then a professorship at Penn. In 1971 he joined Columbia University.

Phelps’s work can be seen as a program to put “people as we know them” back into economic models—accounting for the incompleteness of their information and studying the effects of their expectations on the market. He applies this perspective in studying unemployment and inclusion, economic growth, business swings and dynamism.

Phelps was elected Fellow of the National Academy of Science in 1982 and made a Distinguished Fellow of the American Economic Association in 2000. He was greatly honored in 2001 with a Festschrift celebration and resulting conference volume. He has been awarded several honorary professorships in China, including one from Tsinghua University in 2007.  In 2008 he was named Chevalier of the Legion of Honor, awarded the Premio Pico della Mirandola and the Kiel Global Economy Prize. University of Buenos Aires Law School established the Catedra Phelps and the Phelps Medal for Innovation. In 2011, he was named a Full Foreign Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences and received the Louise Blouin Creative Leadership Award. In 2012, Phelps was elected an Honorary Patron of the University Philosophical Society of Trinity College.  He has received many honorary professorships and honorary degrees, the latest a doctorate from the Université Libre de Bruxelles in June 2010. In 2014, he received the Chinese government Friendship Award and the Wilbur Cross Medal from Yale University. In 2015, he was given a Lifetime Achievement Award by the International Federation of Finance Museums in Beijing, China.