Christopher A. Pissarides
Encyclopedia
Christopher Antoniou Pissarides F.B.A.  is a Cypriot
Greek Cypriots
Greek Cypriots are the ethnic Greek population of Cyprus, forming the island's largest ethnolinguistic community at 77% of the population. Greek Cypriots are mostly members of the Church of Cyprus, an autocephalous Greek Orthodox Church within the wider communion of Orthodox Christianity...

 economist
Economist
An economist is a professional in the social science discipline of economics. The individual may also study, develop, and apply theories and concepts from economics and write about economic policy...

. He currently holds the Norman Sosnow Chair in Economics at the London School of Economics
London School of Economics
The London School of Economics and Political Science is a public research university specialised in the social sciences located in London, United Kingdom, and a constituent college of the federal University of London...

. His research interests focus on several topics of macroeconomics
Macroeconomics
Macroeconomics is a branch of economics dealing with the performance, structure, behavior, and decision-making of the whole economy. This includes a national, regional, or global economy...

, notably labor, economic growth
Economic growth
In economics, economic growth is defined as the increasing capacity of the economy to satisfy the wants of goods and services of the members of society. Economic growth is enabled by increases in productivity, which lowers the inputs for a given amount of output. Lowered costs increase demand...

, and economic policy
Economic policy
Economic policy refers to the actions that governments take in the economic field. It covers the systems for setting interest rates and government budget as well as the labor market, national ownership, and many other areas of government interventions into the economy.Such policies are often...

. In 2010, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics
Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences
The Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, commonly referred to as the Nobel Prize in Economics, but officially the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel , is an award for outstanding contributions to the field of economics, generally regarded as one of the...

, jointly with Peter A. Diamond
Peter A. Diamond
Peter Arthur Diamond is an American economist known for his analysis of U.S. Social Security policy and his work as an advisor to the Advisory Council on Social Security in the late 1980s and 1990s. He was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2010, along with Dale T. Mortensen...

 and Dale Mortensen
Dale T. Mortensen
Dale Thomas Mortensen is an American economist. He received his B.A. in economics from Willamette University and his Ph.D. in Economics from Carnegie Mellon University. He is a member of the Beta Theta Pi fraternity...

, for his contributions to the theory of search frictions
Search theory
In microeconomics, search theory studies buyers or sellers who cannot instantly find a trading partner, and must therefore search for a partner prior to transacting....

 and macroeconomics.

Biography

Pissarides was born in Cyprus
Cyprus
Cyprus , officially the Republic of Cyprus , is a Eurasian island country, member of the European Union, in the Eastern Mediterranean, east of Greece, south of Turkey, west of Syria and north of Egypt. It is the third largest island in the Mediterranean Sea.The earliest known human activity on the...

 (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
University of Essex
The University of Essex is a British campus university whose original and largest campus is near the town of Colchester, England. Established in 1963 and receiving its Royal Charter in 1965...

. He subsequently enrolled in the London School of Economics
London School of Economics
The London School of Economics and Political Science is a public research university specialised in the social sciences located in London, United Kingdom, and a constituent college of the federal University of London...

, where he received his PhD in Economics in 1973 under the supervision of the mathematical economist Michio Morishima
Michio Morishima
was a Japanese economist, mathematician and econometrician, who was a faculty member at the London School of Economics from 1970-88 as the Sir John Hicks Professor of Economics...

.

He currently holds the Norman Sosnow Chair in Economics at the Economics Department and is Director of the Research Programme on Macroeconomics at the Centre for Economic Performance, both at the London School of Economics
London School of Economics
The London School of Economics and Political Science is a public research university specialised in the social sciences located in London, United Kingdom, and a constituent college of the federal University of London...

 (where he has been since 1976).

Academic contributions

Pissarides is mostly known for his contributions to the search and matching theory for studying the interactions between the labor market and the macro economy
Macroeconomics
Macroeconomics is a branch of economics dealing with the performance, structure, behavior, and decision-making of the whole economy. This includes a national, regional, or global economy...

. He helped develop the concept of the matching function (explaining the flows from unemployment
Unemployment
Unemployment , as defined by the International Labour Organization, occurs when people are without jobs and they have actively sought work within the past four weeks...

 to employment at a given moment of time), and pioneered the empirical work on its estimation.

More recently Pissarides has done research on structural change
Structural change
Structural change of an economy refers to a long-term widespread change of the fundamental structure, rather than microscale or short-term output and employment. For example, a subsistence economy is transformed into a manufacturing economy, or a regulated mixed economy is liberalized...

 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
Review of Economic Studies
The Review of Economic Studies is a peer-reviewed academic journal in economics. It was established in 1933 and is published by Wiley-Blackwell. It is the eighth-ranked economics journal in overall impact according to the ranking of Kalaitzidakis et al...

in 1994. 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
Macroeconomics
Macroeconomics is a branch of economics dealing with the performance, structure, behavior, and decision-making of the whole economy. This includes a national, regional, or global economy...

. 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
Macroeconomics
Macroeconomics is a branch of economics dealing with the performance, structure, behavior, and decision-making of the whole economy. This includes a national, regional, or global economy...

 of unemployment
Unemployment
Unemployment , as defined by the International Labour Organization, occurs when people are without jobs and they have actively sought work within the past four weeks...

, 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 honors

  • Fellow of the Econometric Society
    Econometric Society
    The Econometric Society is an international society for the advancement of economic theory in its relation with statistics and mathematics. It was founded on December 29, 1930 at the Stalton Hotel in Cleveland, Ohio....

    , 1997
  • Fellow of the British Academy, 2002
  • Fellow of the European Economic Association
    European Economic Association
    The European Economic Association is a professional academic body which links European economists. It was founded in the mid-1980s. Its first annual congress was in 1986 in Vienna, Austria...

    , 2005
  • IZA Prize in Labor Economics, jointly with Dale Mortensen, 2005
  • Foreign Honorary Member of the American Economic Association
    American Economic Association
    The American Economic Association, or AEA, is a learned society in the field of economics, headquartered in Nashville, Tennessee. It publishes one of the most prestigious academic journals in economics: the American Economic Review...

    , 2011
  • Vice President of the European Economic Association
    European Economic Association
    The European Economic Association is a professional academic body which links European economists. It was founded in the mid-1980s. Its first annual congress was in 1986 in Vienna, Austria...

     - President in 2011
  • Nobel Prize in Economics
    Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences
    The Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, commonly referred to as the Nobel Prize in Economics, but officially the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel , is an award for outstanding contributions to the field of economics, generally regarded as one of the...

     in 2010, jointly with Dale Mortensen, Peter A. Diamond
    Peter A. Diamond
    Peter Arthur Diamond is an American economist known for his analysis of U.S. Social Security policy and his work as an advisor to the Advisory Council on Social Security in the late 1980s and 1990s. He was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2010, along with Dale T. Mortensen...

    , for "analysis of markets with search frictions"

Selected works

  • 1979. "Job Matchings with State Employment Agencies and Random Search", Economic Journal 89(356), pp. 818–33.
  • "Short-Run Equilibrium Dynamics of Unemployment Vacancies, and Real Wages," American Economic Review, (1985) 75(4), pp. 676–90.
  • 1986. "Unemployment and Vacancies in Britain." Economic Policy, 1(3), p p. 499–559.
  • 1994. "Job Creation and Job Destruction in the Theory of Unemployment" (with Dale Mortensen), Review of Economic Studies 61(3), pp. 397–415.
  • 2000. Equilibrium Unemployment Theory, second edition, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Description and chapter-preview links.
  • "Structural Change in a Multi-Sector Model of Growth" (with L. Rachel Ngai), American Economic Review, forthcoming.

External links

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