Harvard's Laureates in Economic Science

Claudia Goldin grew up in New York City and earned degrees from Cornell and the University of Chicago. An economic historian and a labor economist, Goldin’s research covered a wide range of topics, including the female labor force, the gender gap in earnings, income inequality, technological change, education, and immigration. Goldin is best known for her historical work on women in the U.S. economy, including the history of women’s quest for career and family, coeducation in higher education, and the impact of birth control on women’s career and marriage decisions. The 2023 Nobel Prize highlighted her work uncovering key drivers of gender differences in the labour market.

Growing up in Kansas, Michael Kremer began taking courses at Kansas State University when he was in the fifth grade. He received his undergraduate degree and Ph.D. from Harvard, before teaching at MIT, Harvard, and the University of Chicago. His research focused on economic growth and poverty alleviation, particularly as it related to education and health. Kremer was a professor at Harvard when he was awarded the 2019 Nobel Prize alongside Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo for their research helping to fight poverty.

Oliver Hart was born in London, Great Britain and studied mathematics at Cambridge University, economics at the University of Warwick, and received his Ph.D. at Princeton University. He has been affiliated with several universities, including Cambridge University, London School of Economics, MIT, and Harvard. Hart works mainly on contract theory, the theory of the firm, corporate finance, and law and economics. His research centers on the roles that ownership structure and contractual arrangements play in the governance and boundaries of corporations. He shared the 2016 Prize with Bengt Holmstrom.

Alvin E. Roth earned degrees from Columbia and Stanford, where he studied operations research. Roth has taught at the University of Illinois, the University of Pittsburgh, Harvard, and Stanford. He has made significant contributions to the fields of game theory, market design and experimental economics, and is known for his emphasis on applying economic theory to solutions for “real-world” problems. His 2012 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences was shared with Lloyd Shapley.

Eric Maskin grew up in New Jersey and studied mathematics at Harvard. After receiving his Ph.D., he taught economics at MIT, Harvard, and the Institute for Advanced Study. He has made contributions to game theory, contract theory, social choice theory, political economy, and other areas of economics. His 2007 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences was awarded jointly with Leonid Hurwicz and Roger Myerson for their work on the foundations of mechanism design theory.

Thomas Schelling spent his childhood in California, then attended Harvard University, where he received his Ph.D. As one of the “founding fathers” of the Harvard Kennedy School, he helped design curriculum for a new generation of leaders literate in public policy. His pioneering work in game theory and understanding of the “subtle tension…between conflict and cooperation” led him to advise President Kennedy during the Berlin crisis. He specialized in the application of game theory to cases in which adversaries must repeatedly interact, especially in international trade, treaties and conflicts. His 2005 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences was shared with Robert Aumann.

A. Michael Spence’s 1972 Harvard doctoral dissertation— “Market Signaling: The Informational Structure of Job Markets and Related Phenomena”—developed the core ideas behind his theory of signaling. Spence served as a professor at Harvard as well as Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Science. Spence’s research focused on information economics, especially how markets work when buyers and sellers have unequal information. His best-known work developed the signaling theory, showing how education, job credentials, prices, and advertising can signal otherwise hidden qualities, such as a worker’s ability or a product’s quality. He shared the 2001 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences with George Akerlof and Joseph Stiglitz.

Amartya Sen earned a bachelor’s degree from Presidency College in Calcutta, India and a Ph.D. from Trinity College Cambridge, United Kingdom, where he studied economics and also developed a strong interest in philosophy. His research examined welfare economics, poverty, famine, inequality, social choice, and how economic development affects opportunity and wellbeing. Sen joined the faculty at Harvard in 1987. He won the 1998 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for his contributions to welfare economics, especially his work on social-choice theory, poverty measurement, and the economic causes of famine.

Robert C. Merton earned a B.S. from Columbia University, an M.S. in applied mathematics from the California Institute of Technology, and a Ph.D. in economics from MIT. He studied mathematical finance, financial markets, risk management, and the pricing of financial securities such as stock options and other derivatives. Merton joined Harvard Business School in 1988. He shared the 1997 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences with Myron Scholes for developing a new method to determine the value of derivatives, building on and extending the Black–Scholes option-pricing model.

With a Ph.D. from the University of Berlin, Wassily Leontief’s research focused on using mathematics and data to understand how industries within an economy depend on one another. Leontief joined Harvard’s economics department in 1933 and later directed the Harvard Economic Research Project. Leontief’s pioneering formulas allowed economists to determine with unprecedented precision how changes in one sector of the economy impact the performance of others. He won the 1973 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for developing input-output analysis, a method for analyzing the structure of an entire economy and the flow of goods and services among its industries.

Kenneth J. Arrow earned degrees from the City College of New York and Columbia University, and taught at Harvard University from 1968 to 1979 before returning to Stanford. He studied mathematical economics, social-choice theory, general equilibrium, welfare economics, and the ways individual preferences can be combined into collective decisions. Arrow’s work incorporating advanced mathematical methods into economics and political science has helped shape state economic policies around the world. He shared the 1972 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences with John Hicks.

Simon Kuznets was born in present-day Belarus and emigrated to the U.S. in 1922. He earned degrees from Columbia University, where he studied economics, statistics, and economic history, and he joined the faculty at Harvard in 1960. Kuznets developed methods for calculating the size of a nation’s income and changes in it, and standardized the concept of gross national product (GNP). Kuznets also analyzed swings in the economy’s growth rate over long periods and how these were connected with population growth. Although he is best known for the Kuznets curve, which describes the relationship between economic growth and inequality, he won the 1971 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for his work with growth and the economy’s size.