Manchester's Nobel Economists
Three economists who currently, or who have previously, taught and/or researched at Manchester have been awarded the highest accolade that the economics profession can bestow - The Nobel Prize.
Current
Joseph E. Stiglitz (b.1943, Nobel Prize Winner 2001) clarified the opposite type of market adjustment, where poorly informed agents extract information from the better informed, such as the screening performed by insurance companies dividing customers into risk classes by offering a menu of contracts where higher deductibles can be exchanged for significantly lower premiums. In a number of contributions about different markets, Stiglitz has shown that asymmetric information can provide the key to understanding many observed market phenomena, including unemployment and credit rationing.
Professor Stiglitz, Professor of economics and a former World Bank Chief Economist, is the Chair of the Brooks World Poverty Institute at the University of Manchester.
Past
Sir Arthur Lewis (1915-1991) was awarded the prize in 1979 for his pioneering work in the field of development economics, the branch of economics which seeks to explain why and how poor countries develop and grow. Lewis became a Professor of Economics at Manchester in 1948, at the young age of 33, and claims in his Nobel autobiography that it was the varied international background of the student body at Manchester that encouraged him to take up the study of development economics. Development economics is still a major area of study in Economics today and the student body has become even more international in character since those days.
Sir John R. Hicks (1904-1989) was awarded the Prize in 1972 for his work in microeconomic theory with particular focus on how different markets interact and on how people's welfare is affected by economic structures and forms of organisation. Hicks was in Manchester during the second world war and wrote his most important works on welfare economics at that time. The kind of theoretical analysis that characterised his work continues to infuse research at Manchester and a number of members of the School work in areas that Hicks pioneered.