Christopher A. Pissarides

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Christopher A. Pissarides bigraphy, stories - Cypriot economist

Christopher A. Pissarides : biography

20 February 1948 –

Professor Sir Christopher Antoniou Pissarides FBA ( born 20 February 1948 at debretts.com) is a Cypriot/British economist. He is the School Professor of Economics & Political Science and Regius Professor Designate at the London School of Economics. His research interests focus on several topics of macroeconomics, notably labour, economic growth, and economic policy. In 2010, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics, jointly with Peter A. Diamond and Dale Mortensen, for his contributions to the theory of search frictions and macroeconomics., official web site

Academic contributions

Pissarides is mostly known for his contributions to the search and matching theory for studying the interactions between the labour market and the macro economy. He helped develop the concept of the matching function (explaining the flows from unemployment to employment at a given moment of time), and pioneered the empirical work on its estimation. Pissarides has also done research on structural change and growth.

Pissarides’ most influential paper is arguably "Job Creation and Job Destruction in the Theory of Unemployment" (with Dale Mortensen)", published in the Review of Economic Studies in 1994.Dale T. Mortensen and Christopher A. Pissarides, 1994. "Job Creation and Job Destruction in the Theory of Unemployment," Review of Economic Studies, 61(3), pp. (press +). This paper built on the previous individual contributions that both authors had been making in the previous two decades.

The Mortensen-Pissarides model that resulted from this paper has been exceptionally influential in modern macroeconomics. In one or another of its extensions or variations, today it is part of the core of most graduate economics curricula throughout the world.

Pissarides’ book Equilibrium Unemployment Theory, a standard reference in the literature of the macroeconomics of unemployment, is now in the second edition, and was revised after Pissarides’s joint work with Mortensen, resulting in the analysis of both endogenous job creation and destruction.

Awards and honours

  • Fellow of the Econometric Society, 1997
  • Fellow of the British Academy, 2002
  • Fellow of the European Economic Association, 2005
  • IZA Prize in Labour Economics, jointly with Dale Mortensen, 2005
  • Foreign Honorary Member of the American Economic Association, 2011
  • Vice President of the European Economic Association – President in 2011
  • Nobel Prize in Economics in 2010, jointly with Dale Mortensen, Peter A. Diamond, for "analysis of markets with search frictions"
  • The College Historical Society of Trinity College Dublin awarded Pissarides its Gold Medal for Outstanding Contribution to Public Discourse in 2012

Pissarides was knighted in the 2013 Birthday Honours for services to economics.

Biography

Pissarides was born in Cyprus (into a Greek-Cypriot family) in the village of Agros. He received his B.A. in Economics in 1970 and his M.A. in Economics in 1971 at the University of Essex. He subsequently enrolled in the London School of Economics, where he received his PhD in Economics in 1973 under the supervision of the mathematical economist Michio Morishima.

He is Regius Professor Designate at the Economics Department at the London School of Economics (where he has been since 1976). and Chair of the Centre for Macroeconomics.