Wednesday, September 4, 2013

Peter Diamond

Peter Diamond, Huffington Post (06/06/11)

 In October 2010, Peter Diamond was jointly awarded the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel with two others "for their analysis of Markets with search frictions."1 But before he became an American Economist, he attended Yale where he majored in Mathematics and discovered his interest in Economics. Soon after graduating summa cum laude, he applied to graduate school at MIT for his Ph.D., where he now works as an Institute Professor in the Department of Economics.
"More generally, MIT was (and is) a terrific place to be a graduate student, to get an outstanding and broad education, while having a good time.  And it has been a terrific place to be a faculty member."2
Diamond stated that as an economist he has always been more interested in "working on models generating new insights, and not much in generalizations."2 His main fields include Search Theory and Labor Economics, where he has focused much of his professional career on the analysis of the U.S. Social Security policy.
"Family and economics have been the two poles around which I function, one a source of great joy and the other of great pleasure."2
In April 2010, President Barack Obama nominated Diamond to be one of the seven governors of the Fed, and renominated him again in September, and again in January when Republican Senators blocked the floor vote on his confirmation. He has since withdrawn from his nominations due to the opposition of the Senate.3

Diamond also came to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign for a lecture series co-hosted by the Department of Economics, where he spoke on the topics of Unemployment and Government Debt. I had never heard of Peter Diamond before this course, however, I do believe his work in labor, welfare, and behavioral economics will be relevant to the economics we discuss as we attempt to understand certain organizational issues.


References

1 "The Prize in Economic Sciences 2010". Nobelprize.org. Nobel Media AB 2013. Web. 4 Sep 2013. <http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economic-sciences/laureates/2010/>
2 "Peter A. Diamond - Biographical". Nobelprize.org. Nobel Media AB 2013. Web. 4 Sep 2013. <http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economic-sciences/laureates/2010/diamond-bio.html>
3 Diamond, Peter. "When a Nobel Prize Isn’t Enough." The New York Times. The New York Times Company, 5 June 2011. Web. <http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/06/opinion/06diamond.html>.
Posted at

1 comment:

  1. Professor ArvanSeptember 10, 2013 at 7:05 AM

    Sorry to be late commenting on this. I missed it the first time.

    Diamond was nominated to the Fed by President Obama, but his nomination was held up in the Senate. Senator Shelby, in particular, is associated with blocking that appointment.

    Diamond came here last spring to deliver the David Kinley Lecture. He gave an excellent talk. He said, modestly, that he was no longer doing search theory, so he felt he didn't deserve the Nobel as he wasn't current on the work of Mortensen and Pissarides. Diamond has been a great contributor in many fields. He definitely deserved the prize.

    ReplyDelete

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)