Edmund Phelps – Keynote Speaker

Edmund Phelps is the McVickar Professor of Political Economy at Columbia University, Director of Columbia’s Center on Capitalism and Society and the winner of the 2006 Nobel Prize for Economics.

He served as Senior Advisor to the project Italy in Europe at the Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, Italy, for three years until 2000. He was a member of the International Panel on Economic Policy of the OFCE in Paris in the 1990s, and co-organiser of the annual Villa Mondragone seminar of the University of Rome ‘Tor Vergata’ from 1990 to 2000. He was a charter member of the Economic Advisory council of the EBRD and wrote most of the Annual Economic Outlook, which appeared in September 1993. He has been a consultant at the U.S. Treasury Department, U.S. Senate Finance Committee, and Federal Reserve Board.

During the last 40 years Edmund Phelps has published extensively in professional journals. His recent books include “Structural Slumps: The Modern Equilibrium Theory of Employment, Interest and Assets” and “Rewarding Work: How to Restore Participation and Self-Support to Free Enterprise” (both Harvard University Press).

In 2008 he was named Chevalier of the Legion of Honor, won the Premio Pico della Mirandola for humanism and the Kiel Global Economy Prize.

Alongside his interest in the functioning and performance of capitalist institutions, Edmund Phelps has also done research on the causes and cures of joblessness and low wages among disadvantaged workers.

Phelps’s current work is about the benefits and sources of a country’s structural dynamism – the enterprise and creativity of entrepreneurs, the skill of financiers in selecting and supporting the best projects, and the knowledge managers draw upon in evaluating and making use of new methods and products.