Edmund Phelps

Edmund Strother Phelps, (born July 26, 1933) is an American economist and the winner of the 2006 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. Early in his career, he became known for his research at Yale's Cowles Foundation in the first half of the 1960s on the sources of economic growth. His demonstration of the golden rule savings rate, a concept related to work by John von Neumann and Maurice Allais, started a wave of research on how much a nation should spend on present consumption rather than save and invest for future generations. Phelps was at the University of Pennsylvania from 1966 to 1972 and moved to Columbia University in 1972. His most seminal work inserted a microfoundation, one featuring imperfect information, incomplete knowledge and expectations about wages and prices, to support a macroeconomic theory of employment determination and price-wage dynamics. That led to his development of the natural rate of unemployment: its existence and the mechanism governing its size. In the mid-2000s, he turned to the study of business innovation. He has been McVickar Professor of Political Economy at Columbia since 1982. He is also the director of Columbia's Center on Capitalism and Society. 2Early life and education Phelps was born in Evanston, Illinois, and he moved with his family to Hastings-on-Hudson, New York when he was six, where he spent his school year