James Mirrlees

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Professor Sir James Mirrlees, FBA (born 5 July 1936, Minnigaff, Wigtownshire Scotland) is a Scottish economist and winner of the 1996 Nobel Prize for Economics. He was knighted in 1998.

He was educated at the University of Edinburgh and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was a very active student debater. He taught at both Oxford (1969-1995) and Cambridge (1963- and 1995-). During his time at Oxford he published the economic models and equations for which he would eventually be awarded his Nobel Prize. They centred around situations in which economic information is asymmetrical or incomplete, determining the extent to which they should affect the optimal rate of saving in an economy. Among other results, they demonstrated the principles of "moral hazard" and "optimal income taxation" discussed in the books of William Vickrey. The methodology has since become the standard in the field.

Vickrey and Mirrlees shared the 1996 Nobel Prize for Economics "for their fundamental contributions to the economic theory of incentives under asymmetric information".

Mirrlees is emeritus Professor of Political Economy at the University of Cambridge, and Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. He spends several months a year at the University of Melbourne, Australia. In 2006, he was appointed Master-Designate of the Morningside College of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, along with the biologist Samuel Sun Sai-ming [1].

[edit] Links

Biographic speech from The Chinese University of Hong Kong