Christopher A. Pissarides


Sir Christopher Antoniou Pissarides is a British-Cypriot economist. He is the School Professor of Economics & Political Science and Regius Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics, and Professor of European Studies at the University of Cyprus. His research focuses on topics of macroeconomics, notably labour, economic growth, and economic policy. In 2010, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics, jointly with Peter A. Diamond and Dale Mortensen, "for their analysis of markets with theory of search frictions."

Early life

Pissarides was born in Nicosia, Cyprus, into a Greek Orthodox family from the village of Agros.
Pissarides was educated at the Pancyprian Gymnasium in Nicosia. He earned bachelor's and master's degrees in economics from the University of Essex in 1970 and 1971, and a PhD in economics from the London School of Economics in 1973, under the supervision of the mathematical economist Michio Morishima for a thesis entitled "Individual behaviour in markets with imperfect information."

Career

Pissarides is Regius Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics, where he has been since 1976. He is chairman of the Centre for Macroeconomics, which deploys economists from the University of Cambridge, the London School of Economics, the University College London, the Bank of England, and the National Institute of Economic and Social Research.
He has held a lectureship at the University of Southampton, and visiting professorships at Harvard University and the University of California, Berkeley.
He served as the chairman of the National Economy Council of the Republic of Cyprus during the country's financial crisis in 2012 and resigned to focus on his academic work at the end of 2014. In 2018, in collaboration with Naomi Climer and Anna Thomas, he set up the charity Institute for the Future of Work in London, to promote the establishment of good jobs in the era of automation and artificial intelligence. On February 2020 the right-wing Greek prime minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis picked Pissarides to chair a committee tasked with drafting a long-term growth strategy for the country.

Academic contributions

Pissarides is mostly known for his contributions to the search and matching theory for studying the interactions between the labour market and the macro economy. He helped develop the concept of the matching function, and pioneered the empirical work on its estimation. Pissarides has also done research on structural change and growth.
Pissarides' most influential paper is arguably "Job Creation and Job Destruction in the Theory of Unemployment", published in the Review of Economic Studies in 1994. This paper built on the previous individual contributions that both authors had made in the previous two decades.
The Mortensen–Pissarides model that resulted from this paper has been exceptionally influential in modern macroeconomics. In one or another of its extensions or variations, today it is part of the core of most graduate economics curricula throughout the world.
Pissarides' book Equilibrium Unemployment Theory, a standard reference in the literature of the macroeconomics of unemployment, is now in its second edition, and was revised after Pissarides' joint work with Mortensen, resulting in the analysis of both endogenous job creation and destruction.

Awards and honours

*