This entry examines the approach of Hyman P. Minsky to financial crisis. Minsky famously developed an ‘investment theory of the cycle and a financial theory of investment'. His thesis was that, over the course of the cycle, behaviour changes in such a way that financial fragility develops....

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...

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’.

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...

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...

Christopher Sims is one of the leaders in time-series econometrics and empirical macroeconomics and is well known for introducing the VAR approach to econometrics and macroeconomic modelling. Sims' main contribution to empirical macroeconomics was to show how macro-econometric modeling should be...

Tommaso Padoa-Schioppa was a distinguished central banker and economist, a key player in the creation of Europe's single currency, a well-respected figure in international monetary policy-making and a former economy and finance minister of Italy.