Christopher A. Pissarides

Christopher A. Pissarides
Sir Christopher Antoniou Pissarides (born 20 February 1948) is a Cypriot economist. He is the School Professor of Economics and Political Science, Regius Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics, and Professor of European Studies at the University of Cyprus. His research focuses on topics of macroeconomics, notably labour, economic growth, and economic policy. In 2010, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics, jointly with Peter A. Diamond and Dale Mortensen, "for their analysis of markets with theory of search frictions."
Early life
Pissarides was born in Nicosia, Cyprus, into a Greek Orthodox family from the village of Agros.
Pissarides was educated at the Pancyprian Gymnasium in Nicosia. He earned bachelor's and master's degrees in economics from the University of Essex in 1970 and 1971, and a PhD in economics from the London School of Economics in 1973, under the supervision of the mathematical economist Michio Morishima for a thesis entitled "Individual behaviour in markets with imperfect information."
Career
Pissarides is Regius Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics, where he has been since 1976. He is chairman of the Centre for Macroeconomics, which deploys economists from the University of Cambridge, the London School of Economics, the University College London, the Bank of England, and the National Institute of Economic and Social Research.
He has held a lectureship at the University of Southampton (1974–76), and visiting professorships at Harvard University (1979–80) and the University of California, Berkeley (1990–91).
He served as the chairman of the National Economy Council of the Republic of Cyprus during the country's financial crisis in 2012, and resigned to focus on his academic work at the end of 2014.
In 2018, in collaboration with Naomi Climer and Anna Thomas, he set up the Institute for the Future of Work, a London-based research and development institute exploring how new technologies are transforming work and working lives.
In February 2020, Greek prime minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis picked Pissarides to chair a committee tasked with drafting a long-term growth strategy for the country. Since September 2020 he is chairman of the economic council of EuroAfrica Interconnector.
In June 2021, it was announced that he would lead a review into the future of work and wellbeing, a three-year collaboration between the Institute for the Future of Work, Imperial College London, and Warwick Business School, funded by a £1.8 million grant from the Nuffield Foundation. The Pissarides Review into the Future of Work and Wellbeing was launched in March 2022.
Academic contributions
Pissarides is credited with contributions to the search and matching theory for studying the interactions between the labour market and the macro economy. He helped develop the concept of the matching function (explaining the flows from unemployment to employment at a given moment of time) and pioneered the empirical work on its estimation. Pissarides has also done research on structural change and growth.
One of his papers, "Job Creation and Job Destruction in the Theory of Unemployment" (with Dale Mortensen), was published in the Review of Economic Studies in 1994.
Pissarides' book Equilibrium Unemployment Theory, a study of the macroeconomics of unemployment, is now in its second edition and was revised after his joint work with Mortensen resulted in the analysis of both endogenous job creation and destruction.
Awards and honours
Fellow of the Econometric Society, 1997
Fellow of the British Academy, 2002
Fellow of the European Economic Association, 2005
IZA Prize in Labor Economics, jointly with Dale Mortensen, 2005
Foreign Honorary Member of the American Economic Association, 2011
Vice-president of the European Economic Association, President in 2011
Nobel Prize in Economics in 2010, jointly with Dale Mortensen, Peter A. Diamond, for "analysis of markets with search frictions"
The College Historical Society of Trinity College Dublin awarded Pissarides its Gold Medal for Outstanding Contribution to Public Discourse in 2012
In 2013, Knighted in the 2013 Birthday Honours for "services to economics."
Member of the Academy of Athens, 2015
Selected works
Description and chapter-preview links.
References
External links
Christopher A Pissarides personal page at London School of Economics
Christopher Pissarides' personal website
including the Nobel lecture on 8 December 2010 Equilibrium in the Labour Market with Search Frictions
Profile and Papers at Research Papers in Economics/RePEc
Christopher Pissarides commemorative postage stamp issued from the Cyprus Post Office, 8 June 2011
1948 births
Living people
Cypriot Nobel laureates
Cypriot economists
Labor economists
Members of the Academy of Athens (modern)
Fellows of the Econometric Society
Fellows of the British Academy
Knights Bachelor
Nobel laureates in Economics
20th-century British economists
21st-century British economists
Alumni of the London School of Economics
Alumni of the University of Essex
Academics of the London School of Economics
Academics of the University of Southampton
Academic staff of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
Eastern Orthodox Christians from Cyprus
People educated at Pancyprian Gymnasium
People from Nicosia
People from Limassol District
Academic staff of the University of Cyprus
Naturalised citizens of the United Kingdom