Christopher Pissarides

Christopher Pissarides Speaker Biography

2010 Winner of Nobel Prize in Economics

Christopher Pissarides is Regius Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics and holder of the Norman Sosnow Chair in Economics. He specialises in the economics of unemployment, labour-market theory, labour-market policy and more recently he has written about growth and structural change. He has written extensively in professional journals and his book Equilibrium Unemployment Theory, now in its second edition, is a standard reference in the economics of unemployment. In 2009 he is serving as Vice President of the European Economic Association, to become President Elect in 2010 and President in 2011.

Economics

He has served as Head of the Economics Department at LSE, and he is an elected Fellow of the British Academy, the Econometric Society, the European Economic Association and the Society of Labor Economists. He is also a member of Council of the European Economic Association and the Econometric Society and a former member of Council of the Royal Economic Society. He is the chairman of the Economica board, and a member of other editorial boards, a research fellow of the Centre of Economic Performance at LSE (and a former head of its Macroeconomics Research Programme), of the Centre for Economic Policy Research (London), and of the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA, Bonn).

Awards

He is also a Non-National Senior Associate, Forum for Economic Research in the Arab Countries, Iran and Turkey and a former member of the Monetary Policy Committee of the Central Bank of Cyprus (2000-2007). He has served on the European Employment Task Force (2003) and he has been a consultant on employment policy and other labour issues for the World Bank, the European Commission, the Bank of England and the OECD. In 2005 he was awarded the IZA Prize in Labor Economics (jointly with Dale Mortensen) for his work on unemployment and in 2008 he received the Republic of Cyprus “Aristeion” for the Arts, Literature and Science. Prof. Christopher Pissarides was jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2010, for his contributions to the theory of search frictions and macroeconomics.

Honors

He is an elected Fellow of the British Academy, the Academy of Athens, the Academia Europaea and several other learned societies, and he is a Lifetime Honorary Member of the American Economic Association. In 2011 he served as the President of the European Economic Association. In 2011 he received the Grand Cross of the Republic of Cyprus, the highest honour of the Republic. He was knighted in 2013.