Edmund Phelps

Edmund Phelps is McVickar Professor of Political Economy and director of the Center on Capitalism and Society at Columbia University.

Phelps began his career as an economist at the RAND Corporation in 1959. In 1960, he took a research position at the Cowles Foundation, while also teaching at Yale University. Phelps later worked as a professor of economics at the University of Pennsylvania for five years, beginning in 1966. In 1969-1970, he worked at the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Science at Stanford University. Phelps joined Columbia in 1971 and became McVickar Professor of Political Economy in 1982.

Phelps's books include Political Economy: An Introductory Text; Structural Slumps: The Modern Equilibrium Theory of Unemployment, Interest, and Assets; Microeconomic Foundations of Employment and Inflation Theory; and Mass Flourishing: How Grassroots Innovation Created Jobs, Challenge, and Change. His articles and op-eds have appeared in the Harvard Business Review, CNBC.com, Financial Times, Newsweek, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and other publications.

Phelps is the winner of the 2006 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, he was named a distinguished fellow of the American Economic Association in 2000, and in 2008 he was named Chevalier of France's Legion of Honor and was given the Global Economy Prize of the Kiel Institute for the World Economy.