Edmund Phelps

Premio Nobel de Economía 2006

Edmund Phelps speaker, nobel, economy, Columbia
Inglés

En el año 2006 Edmund Phelps obtuvo el Premio Nobel de Economía, por sus aportaciones al análisis sobre las compensaciones internacionales en las políticas macroeconómicas que cambiaron el curso del pensamiento económico.

 

Según manifestó la Academia Real Sueca de las Ciencias: “sus contribuciones han tenido un impacto decisivo sobre la investigación económica y política”.

 

Un estudio del Social Science Citations Index le sitúa entre los 100 economistas más importantes desde Adam Smith.

 

“El trabajo de Edmund Phelps ha ahondado nuestro conocimiento de la relación entre los efectos de corto y largo recorrido en la política internacional”.

 

Asimismo, Edmund Phelps colaboró con otros economistas para realizar una investigación sobre el crecimiento económico, los efectos de la política monetaria y fiscal y el crecimiento óptimo de la población.

Edmund Phelps ha trabajado en el Departamento del Tesoro, en el Comité de Finanzas del Senado y en la Reserva Federal así como para instituciones extranjeras como el Observatorio Francés de Coyunturas Económicas.

Además, es Miembro de la Academia Nacional de Ciencias de Estados Unidos y miembro distinguido de la Asociación de Economía Americana.

Edmund Phelps es conocido por su teoría de justicia económica, a través de la cual intenta dar un sentido global y sostenible a la riqueza.

Realizó sus estudios en la Universidad de Yale y actualmente es profesor en la Universidad de Columbia en EE.UU. El 1 de junio de 2018 ingresa en la Real Academia Europea de Doctores, en una celebración llevada a cabo en la ciudad de Barcelona.

En junio de 2020, firmó el llamamiento internacional a favor de la economía púrpura («Por un renacimiento cultural de la economía») publicado en El País,​ Corriere della Sera​ y Le Monde. El concepto de economía púrpura hace referencia a la parte de la economía que contribuye al desarrollo sostenible fomentando el potencial cultural de bienes y servicios.

En sus conferencias transmite su amplio conocimiento de los mercados internacionales y sectores estratégicos de la economía, y sus reflexiones y análisis son dignos de escuchar.

 

Economía Global

Macroeconomía

Crecimiento Económico

Mercados de Trabajo

Acumulación de Capital

Desempleo

El Dinamismo y la Inclusión

MASS FLOURISHING

In this book, Nobel Prize-winning economist Edmund Phelps draws on a lifetime of thinking to make a sweeping new argument about what makes nations prosper―and why the sources of that prosperity are under threat today. Why did prosperity explode in some nations between the 1820s and 1960s, creating not just unprecedented material wealth but “flourishing”―meaningful work, self-expression, and personal growth for more people than ever before? Phelps makes the case that the wellspring of this flourishing was modern values such as the desire to create, explore, and meet challenges. These values fueled the grassroots dynamism that was necessary for widespread, indigenous innovation. Most innovation wasn’t driven by a few isolated visionaries like Henry Ford; rather, it was driven by millions of people empowered to think of, develop, and market innumerable new products and processes, and improvements to existing ones. Mass flourishing―a combination of material well-being and the “good life” in a broader sense―was created by this mass innovation.

Yet indigenous innovation and flourishing weakened decades ago. In America, evidence indicates that innovation and job satisfaction have decreased since the late 1960s, while postwar Europe has never recaptured its former dynamism. The reason, Phelps argues, is that the modern values underlying the modern economy are under threat by a resurgence of traditional, corporatist values that put the community and state over the individual. The ultimate fate of modern values is now the most pressing question for the West: will Western nations recommit themselves to modernity, grassroots dynamism, indigenous innovation, and widespread personal fulfillment, or will we go on with a narrowed innovation that limits flourishing to a few?

MASS FLOURISHING

STRUCTURAL SLUMPS

Dissatisfied with the explanations of the business cycle provided by the Keynesian, monetarist, New Keynesian, and real business cycle schools, Edmund Phelps has developed from various existing strands-some modern and some classical--a radically different theory to account for the long periods of unemployment that have dogged the economies of the United States and Western Europe since the early 1970s. Phelps sees secular shifts and long swings of the unemployment rate as structural in nature. That is, they are typically the result of movements in the natural rate of unemployment (to which the equilibrium path is always tending) rather than of long-persisting deviations around a natural rate itself impervious to changing structure. What has been lacking is a "structuralist" theory of how the natural rate is disturbed by real demand and supply shocks, foreign and domestic, and the adjustments they set in motion.

To study the determination of the natural rate path, Phelps constructs three stylized general equilibrium models, each one built around a distinct kind of asset in which firms invest and which is important for the hiring decision. An element of these models is the modern economics of the labor market whereby firms, in seeking to dampen their employees' propensities to quit and shirk, drive wages above market-clearing levels-the phenomenon of the "incentive wage"--and so generate involuntary unemployment in labor-market equilibrium. Another element is the capital market, where interest rates are disturbed by demand and supply shocks such as shifts in profitability, thrift, productivity, and the rate of technical progress and population increase. A general-equilibrium analysis shows how various real shocks, operating through interest rates upon the demand for employees and through the propensity to quit and shirk upon the incentive wage, act upon the natural rate (and thus equilibrium path).

In an econometric and historical section, the new theory of economic activity is submitted to certain empirical tests against global postwar data. In the final section the author draws from the theory some suggestions for government policy measures that would best serve to combat structural slumps.

STRUCTURAL SLUMPS

POLITICAL ECONOMY

The focus, in common with other such texts, is on political economy. Economics arose in response to questions of political interest about national economy; and though economics has since found other applications as well, its vitality and development continue to stem from this central concern. The causes and effects of the way society organizes and regulates its economy-and the resulting debates over instability, inequality, joblessness, inflation, organizational incentives, and the rest-are main stuff of economics from here to China

POLITICAL ECONOMY