George Akerlof is a Professor of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 2001, jointly with A. Michael Spence and Joseph Stiglitz, for their analyses of markets with asymmetric information.

His research broke with established economic theory in illustrating how markets malfunction when buyers and sellers operate under different information. The work has had far-reaching applications in such diverse areas as health insurance, financial markets and employment contracts.

More than any other person in economics, George has worked to show how the insight from sociology, psychology, anthropology and other fields to determine economic influences and outcomes. In their recent book “Animal Spirits”  written jointly with Robert Shiller,  Akerlof and Shiller demonstrate how forces not generally considered in standard macroeconomics—such as fairness, greed, and confidence—are critical to understanding not just why there is unemployment but also why economies fall into recession and why asset markets are so volatile.

Some of the most interesting research in recent years has been precisely about how history, culture and identity shape behavior. Identity economics is a new way to understand people’s decisions–at work, at school, and at home. Identity Economics bridges a critical gap in the social sciences. It brings identity and norms to economics. People’s notions of what is proper, and what is forbidden, and for whom, are fundamental to how hard they work, and how they learn, spend, and save.

Never happy with the neoclassical synthesis and distinctly critical of the New Classical economics, Akerlof has been a major contributor to the development of New Keynesian Economics. Indeed, his work can be seen as a lifetime effort to create a better behavioral micro-foundation to macroeconomics – continuing in the tradition started by Keynes.

His contributions have been influential in Keynesian macroeconomic modeling, agent-based modeling, as well as in applied research on labor markets, and financial markets.

http://econ.berkeley.edu/faculty/803

http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/laureates/2001/akerlof-autobio.html

http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2011/06/people.htm