A mortgage is an exchange of a collection of rights between a borrower and a lender. In this article, we describe those rights and explain both their economic logic and their implications for economic analysis and policy. We briefly discuss the medieval origins of the American mortgage contract...

Roth is the major force in creating a vibrant field of matching theory and its application to market design. In doing so, he has discovered many properties of the stable matching problem (especially from the strategic viewpoint of game theory), studied real-life cases to test the relevance of...

The whole of Paley's contribution to economics is contained in a single chapter of Moral and Political Philosophy (1785). The object of ‘rational politics’ is to maximize ‘happiness’, and Paley argued that this is achieved by maximizing population. Population is determined by the total...

Elinor Ostrom, a recipient of the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2009, had a foundational contribution to the Public Choice movement and to the rise of the new institutionalism and has been a key figure in the resurgence of political economy. Her studies...

The American economist, sociologist and pacifist Emily Greene Balch shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 1946 for the same anti-war activism for which she was not reappointed as a full professor of economics and sociology at Wellesley College in 1918. She was also notable as a defender of the...

Oliver E. Williamson is the 2009 co-recipient (with Elinor Ostrom) of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics, awarded ‘for his analysis of economic governance, especially the boundaries of the firm’.

Peter Diamond has made fundamental contributions to economic theory over a wide range of areas including search theory and its implications for unemployment (for which he was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize), optimal taxation, which he pioneered with James Mirrlees, incomplete markets and their...

Dale T. Mortensen (born 1939) was awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2010 jointly with Peter A. Diamond and Christopher A. Pissarides for his work on the analysis of markets with search frictions. Together, they developed the Diamond-Mortensen-Pissarides Model (DMP model): an equilibrium...

Professor Christopher Pissarides was awarded the 2010 Nobel Prize in Economics jointly with Peter Diamond and Dale Mortensen ‘for their analysis of markets with search frictions’. Though Pissarides is best known for his work in this area, it is only part of a very extensive research agenda...

Thomas J. Sargent is the 2011 recipient of the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences (along with Christopher Sims). Sargent has been instrumental in the development of rational expectations economics. The central idea behind this approach is that individuals should not make systematic mistakes. Yet...