Evanston Resident & Nobel Prize Winner Presented Key to City
Dale T. Mortensen, Professor of Economics at Northwestern University and 2010 Nobel Prize winner, was recognized and presented the key to the City by Evanston Mayor Elizabeth Tisdahl and the November 8, 2010 meeting of the Evanston City Council.
View photos of the ceremony here>>>
Mortensen won the prize in Economic Sciences with Peter Diamond, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Christopher Pissarides, London School of Economics and Political Science in the United Kingdom. The three economists will share a total prize of $1.5 million.
The prize recognized Professor Mortensen and the others for their analysis of markets with search
frictions. The three developed a framework that seeks to explain why there are so many people unemployed at the same time as there are a large number of job openings. Their model helps explain the ways in which unemployment, job vacancies and wages are affected by regulation and economic policy and can also be applied to other areas, including the housing market.
"The Evanston community is proud of the accomplishments of Professor Mortensen throughout his entire academic career at Northwestern University and specifically for his work in analyzing employment trends,” explained Mayor Tisdahl. “He is a remarkable representative of one of the best assets of our community – the high value we place on academia and the critical thinking it engenders.”
Mortensen has been with Northwestern University since 1965. He pioneered the theory of job search and search unemployment and extended it to study labor turnover, research and development, personal relationships and labor reallocation. His insight, that friction is equivalent to the random arrival of trading partners, has become the leading technique for analysis of labor markets and the effects of labor market policy. The development of equilibrium dynamic models designed to account for wage dispersion, the time series behavior of job and worker flows, and the role of reallocation in the determination of aggregate growth and productivity are the principal topics of his current research. His publications include more than 50 scientific articles. His book, “Wage Dispersion: Why Are Similar Workers Paid Differently?” was published by MIT Press in 2003.
More about Professor Mortensen at Northwestern University's News Center>>> at the official website of the Nobel Prize here>>>