George A. Akerlof is the 2001 Nobel Laureate in Economics, a Non-resident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institute, and the Koshland Professor of Economics at the University of California at Berkeley. He is best known for his work on the economics of information, where he first explored the relationship between adverse selection and the organization of markets. This relationship underlies the economics of insurance markets, and yields a major reason for market failure. His papers on staggered contracts, on efficiency wage theory, and on slowly moving wages and prices, with Janet Yellen, are part of the basis for the New Keynesian economics, which gives a modern explanation of the channels whereby monetary policy affects employment, interest rates, and output. In numerous other papers he has also explored how anthropology, sociology, and psychology can be integrated into standard economic analysis.

Dr. Akerlof earned a bachelor's degree at Yale in 1962 and a PhD at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1966. He is a research associate of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. He also is one of five Richard and Rhoda Goldman Distinguished Professors in the College of Letters & Science, appointed in 1997 for five-year terms. Additional awards he has received include a Guggenheim Fellowship, Fulbright Fellowship, Fellow of the Econometric Society and Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He served as senior staff economist with the Council of Economic Advisers from 1973-1974 and was visiting research economist in the special studies section of the Federal Reserve System Board of Governors from 1977-1978. He is a former Cassel Professor of Economics with Respect to Money and Banking at the London School of Economics, and visiting professor at the Indian Statistical Institute in New Delhi.

He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and has served on the Executive Committee and also as Vice President of the American Economic Association. He is serving, or has served, on the editorial boards of several leading economic journals, including the American Economic Review, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, and the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, and Economics and Politics.