Stiglitz, Joseph E.

(born Feb. 9, 1943, Gary, Ind., U.S.) U.S. economist. He received a Ph.D. (1967) from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and taught at several universities, including Yale, Harvard, Stanford, and Columbia. From 1997 to 2000 he was the World Bank's chief economist but often disagreed with the organization's policies. Stiglitz helped found modern development economics, and he changed how economists think about the way markets work. His studies on asymmetric information in the marketplace showed that the poorly informed can obtain information from the better informed through a screening process, for example, when insurance companies determine the risk factors of their clients. He shared the 2001 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences with George A. Akerlof and A. Michael Spence.

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