Lecture to the memory of Alfred Nobel, December 12, 1969

Lecture to the memory of Alfred Nobel, December 8, 1979

I was born in 1910 in 's Graveland, the Netherlands, the third son of Sjoerd Koopmans and Wijtske van der Zee. Both my parents had been trained as schoolteachers and my father was principal of the (Protestant) "School with the Bible". Our house was squeezed between the two sections of that...

Lecture to the memory of Alfred Nobel, December 11, 1970

Lecture to the memory of Alfred Nobel, December 8, 1977

Lecture to the memory of Alfred Nobel, December 8, 1979

"In this age of specialization, I sometimes think of myself as the last 'generalist' in economics," wrote Paul Anthony Samuelson, Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, "with interests that range from mathematical economics down to current financial journalism. My...

I was born in Russia in 1901, of Jewish parents, and came to the United States in 1922 to join my father who left Russia for the United States before World War I. My university studies began in Russia, and were completed at Columbia University (B.Sc. in 1923, M.A. in 1924, Ph.D. in 1926). It was...

I wrote "The Market for 'Lemons,'" (a 13-page paper for which I was awarded the Prize in Economics) during my first year as assistant professor at Berkeley, in 1966-67.* "Lemons" deals with a problem as old as markets themselves. It concerns how horse traders respond to the natural question: "if...

Lecture to the memory of Alfred Nobel, April 27, 1973