Read about George Akerlof net worth, age, wife, children, height, family, parents, salary and career as well as other information you need to know.
Introduction
George Akerlof is an American economist. He is currently a university professor at the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University and Koshland Professor of Economics Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. Akerlof was awarded the 2001 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, jointly with Michael Spence and Joseph Stiglitz, “for their analyses of markets with asymmetric information.”
Early life
| Name | George Akerlof |
| Net Worth | $5 million |
| Occupation | Economist, Professor |
| Age | 82 years |
| Height | 1.78m |
George Arthur Akerlof was born on June 17, 1940 (age 82 years) in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. He is the son of a Jewish family. His mother was Rosalie Clara Grubber (née Hirschfelder), a housewife of German Jewish descent, and his father was Gösta Carl Åkerlöf, a chemist and inventor, who was a Swedish immigrant. George has an older brother, Carl, a physics professor at the University of Michigan.
Akerlof attended Princeton Day School before he graduated from the Lawrenceville School in 1958. He received a bachelor’s in economics from Yale University in 1962 and earned his Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1966. His dissertation was titled Wages and Capital under the supervision of Robert Solow, a noted economist who would later receive the Nobel Memorial Prize.
Career
George Akerlof joined the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley, as an assistant professor of economics, although he taught for only one year before moving to India. In 1967, he spent some time as a visiting professor at the Indian Statistical Institute (ISI) in New Delhi and returned to the United States in September 1968.
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Akerlof then became an associate professor at Berkeley and voted for a tenure-track position at the university. He also served as a senior economist at the White House Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) from 1973 to 1974. In 1977, Akerlof spent a year as a visiting research economist for the Federal Reserve Board of Governors in Washington, D.C. where he met his future wife and coauthor, Janet Yellen.
After that he hoped to be promoted to full professorship, however, Berkeley’s department of economics failed to appoint him. Akerlof and Yellen then moved to the London School of Economics (LSE) in 1978, where he accepted a prestigious post as the Cassel Professor of Money and Banking, while she accepted a tenure-track lectureship. They remained in the United Kingdom for two years before returning to the United States.
In 1980, Akerlof becomes a Goldman Professor of Economics at Berkeley and taught there for most of his career. In 1997, he took a leave of absence from Berkeley to accompany his wife when she was named chair of the Council of Economic Advisers (CEA). At Washington, Akerlof began working for the Brookings Institution as a senior fellow. They both returned to teaching at UC Berkeley in 1999.
Akerlof remained an active faculty member at the university until his retirement. He was awarded Koshland Professor of Economics Emeritus in 2010. After that, he once again moved to Washington when Janet Yellen was confirmed to the Federal Reserve Board. Akerlof received a position as visiting scholar at the International Monetary Fund (IMF) from 2010 to 2014 and joined the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University as a university professor in 2014.
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George Akerlof was one of the signees of a 2018 amici curiae brief that expressed support for Harvard in the Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College lawsuit. Other signees of the brief include Alan B. Krueger, Cecilia E. Rouse, Robert M. Solow, Janet L. Yellen, as well as numerous others.
Wife
George Akerlof is currently married to Janet Yellen, they had their wedding in 1978, His wife is an economist who is the current United States Secretary of the Treasury and former chair of the Federal Reserve, as well as a professor emeritus at Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. They have one child, a son named Robert, who was born in 1981.
Their son Robert Akerlof is also an economist, earned a bachelor’s degree in economics and mathematics from Yale University and obtained his Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University, currently working as an associate professor of economics at the University of Warwick.
Akerlof was married to his ex-wife Kay Leong who is an architect; they wedded in 1974 and divorced three years later after he didn’t get promoted to a full professorship at Berkeley. Following their divorce, Kay moved to New York and remarried a fellow architect.
George Akerlof net worth
How much is George Akerlof worth? George Akerlof net worth is estimated at around $5 million. His main source of income is from his primary work as an economist and a university professor. George Akerlof’s monthly salary and other career earnings are over $400,000 annually. His remarkable achievements have earned him some luxurious lifestyles and some fancy car trips. He is one of the richest and most influential economists in the United States. He stands at an appealing height of 1.78m and has a good body weight which suits his personality.