Christopher Pissarides

Biography

Sir Christopher Pissarides is the Regius Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics and the Professor of European Studies at the University of Cyprus. He also holds the position of Chair of the Council of National Economy of the Republic of Cyprus on a voluntary basis. He was educated at the University of Essex and the London School of Economics, where he spent the bulk of his career.

Sir Christopher specialises in the economics of labour markets, monetary and fiscal policy, and structural change. He was awarded, jointly with Dale Mortensen of Northwestern University and Peter Diamond of MIT, the 2010 Nobel Prize in Economics for his work on markets with frictions, one outcome of which is unemployment. Prior to that, in 2005 he became the first European economist to win the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) Prize in Labor Economics, again sharing it with his collaborator, Dale Mortensen.

He has written extensively in professional journals, magazines and the press, and his book entitled Equilibrium Unemployment Theory is an influential reference in the economics of unemployment that has been translated into many languages. He is an elected fellow of several academies and learned societies, and has received several international honours. Between 2000 and 2007 he was the external member of the Monetary Policy Committee of the Central Bank of Cyprus, which brought the euro to Cyprus. He has also worked as a consultant at the European Commission, World Bank and Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development on matters related to employment and macroeconomic policy.

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