George Akerlof Econ 490 fall 2017

George Arthur Akerlof was born on June 17, 1940, in New Haven, Connecticut. Akerlof  is an American economist who   received his Bachelor’s degree from Yale in 1962, and his Ph.D. in economics from MIT in 1966 , the same year he became an assistant professor at Berkeley. It was during these years that Akerlof began conducting his extensive research in Keynesian macroeconomics. He became a full professor in 1978 and taught at the London School of Economics from 1978-80. Professor Akerlof is a 2001 recipient of the Alfred E. Nobel Prize in Economic Science; he was honored for his theory of asymmetric information and its effect on economic behavior. He is also the 2006 President of the American Economic Association, and is on the North American Council of the Econometric Association. During his first year at Berkeley that, he wrote “The Market for Lemons: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism,” in which he coined the term “lemon” for a car with hidden defects. In