Edmund Phelps - XX Villa Mondragone International Economic Seminar 2008 1

Description: Tor Vergata Economia - Phelps al Villa Mondragone Seminar

Edmund S. Phelps, 2006 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, speaks about Monetary Policy of US economy and western European economies, during the XX Villa Mondragone Seminar organized by Fondazione Tor Vergata Economia CEIS, held on July 1st and 2nd, 2008

Edmund Strother Phelps, Jr. (born July 26, 1933) is an American economist and the winner of the 2006 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. Early in his career he became renowned for his research at Yale's Cowles Foundation in the first half of the 1960s on the sources of economic growth. His concept of the Golden Rule of national saving started a wave of research on how much a nation ought to spend on present consumption rather than save and invest for future generations. His most seminal work inserted a microfoundation - one featuring imperfect information, incomplete knowledge and expectations about wages and prices - to support a macroeconomic theory of employment determination and price-wage dynamics. This led to his development of the natural rate of unemployment – its existence and the mechanism governing its size.

Phelps is McVickar Professor of Political Economy at Columbia University since 1982. He is also the director of Columbia's Center on Capitalism and Society.

Phelps was born in Evanston, Illinois, and moved with his family to Hastings-on-Hudson, New York when he was six years old, where he spent his school years.[1] In 1951, he went to Amherst College for his undergraduate education. At his father's advice, Phelps enrolled in his first economics course in his second year at Amherst. James Nelson gave the course, which was based on the famous textbook by Paul Samuelson. Phelps was strongly impressed with the possibility of applying formal analysis to one of his old interests: business. He quickly became aware of an important unsolved problem with the existing theory, and the existing gap between microeconomics and macroeconomics.

After receiving his B.A. at Amherst in 1955, Phelps went to Yale University for graduate studies. His professors were some of the greatest economists: Nobel prize winners James Tobin and Thomas Schelling, to name a couple. Phelps was also strongly influenced by William Fellner and Henry Wallich, whose courses emphasized the expectations of agents. Phelps received his Ph.D. from Yale in 1959.

SOURCE : WIKIPEDIA (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edmund_Phelps)