George Akerlof received his Bachelor’s degree from Yale in 1962, and his Ph.D. in economics from MIT in 1966. It was during these years that Akerlof began conducting his extensive research in Keynesian macroeconomics.

After graduating, Akerlof became an assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley. During his first year at Berkeley, he wrote “The Market for Lemons: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism,” in which he coined the term “lemon” for a car with hidden defects. In 1967-68, Akerlof spent a year at the Indian Statistical Institute in New Delhi. There he attempted to develop a program to evenly allocate water from the nearby dam. He also continued his research on unemployment and the gaps between supply and demand.

In 1969, after returning from India, Akerlof was granted tenure and joined the faculty in Berkeley’s Department of Economics. In 1977, he moved to Washington, D.C. to work for the Federal Reserve Board in Washington, D.C., where he met Janet Yellen. In "Efficiency Wage Models of the Labor Market", Akerlof and coauthor Janet Yellen (whom he later married) propose rationales for the efficiency wage hypothesis in which employers pay above the market-clearing wage, in contradiction to the conclusions of neoclassical economics.

Akerlof spent time at the London School of Economics, before returning to Berkeley in 1980. Akerlof decided to change his focus in research from macroeconomics to studying the fairness and social customs of unemployment. From 1994 to 1999, Akerlof moved back to Washington, D.C., because his wife had been named to the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. Akerlof and his wife returned to Berkeley in 1999, and since then Akerlof has served as the Koshland Professor of Economics.

George Akerlof demonstrated how a market where sellers have more information than buyers about product quality can contract into an adverse selection of low-quality products. He also pointed out that informational problems are commonplace and important. Akerlof's pioneering contribution thus showed how asymmetric information of borrowers and lenders may explain skyrocketing borrowing rates on local Third World markets; but it also dealt with the difficulties for the elderly to find individual medical insurance and with labor-market discrimination of minorities.

A citizen of France, Olivier Blanchard has spent his professional life in Cambridge, U.S. After obtaining his Ph.D in economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1977, he taught at Harvard University, returning to MIT in 1982, where he has been since then.

He is the Class of 1941 Professor of Economics, and past Chair of the Economics Department. He is currently on leave from MIT, as Economic Counsellor and Director of the Research Department of the International Monetary Fund.

He is a macroeconomist, who has worked on a wide set of issues, from the role of monetary policy, to the nature of speculative bubbles, the labor market and the determinants of unemployment, to transition in former communist countries. In the process, he has worked with numerous countries and international organizations. He is the author of many books and articles, including two textbooks in macroeconomics, one at the graduate level with Stanley Fischer, one at the undergraduate level.

He is a fellow and Council member of the Econometric Society, a past vice president of the American Economic Association, and a member of the American Academy of Sciences.

He joined the Berkeley faculty in 1988 and was promoted to full professor in 1993. From February 2009 to September 2010, he was a Senior Resident Scholar at the International Monetary Fund. He received his A.B. from Princeton University in 1980 and his Ph.D. from M.I.T. in 1985.

Professor Romer is co-director of the Program in Monetary Economics at the National Bureau of Economic Research, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and co-editor of the Brookings Papers on Economic Activity. He is also a former member of the American Economic Association Executive Committee, a three-time recipient of Berkeley's Graduate Economic Association's distinguished teaching and advising awards, a member of the NBER Business Cycle Dating Committee, and a recipient of an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Research Fellowship.

Most of Professor Romer’s recent research is concerned with monetary and fiscal policy. The work considers both the effects of policy on the economy and the determinants of policy. The issues this work examines include the macroeconomic effects of tax and interest-rate changes, the sources of the high inflation of the 1970s, the motivations for changes in tax policy, and the incentives effects of high marginal tax rates. His other research interests include the foundations of price stickiness, empirical evidence on economic growth, and asset price volatility.

Mr. Stiglitz served as a World Bank Chief Economist and Senior Vice President in development economics from 1997 to 1999. Prior to that, he served on President Clinton's economic team as Chairman of the U.S. Council of Economic Advisors from 1993 to 1997.

In 2001, Mr. Stiglitz accepted a joint chaired professorship at Columbia Business School, the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (in the Department of Economics) and the School of International and Public Affairs.

In October 2001, Mr. Stiglitz was awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics. He has been a fellow of the Econometric Society since the age of 29, and is a member of the National Academy of Science. He also received the prestigious John Bates Clark Medal. He was a Fulbright Scholar and a Tapp Junior Research Fellow at Cambridge University in 1970.