Christopher A. Pissarides is Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics and holder of the Norman Sosnow Chair in Economics. He specialises in the economics of unemployment, labour-market theory, labour-market policy and more recently he has written about growth and structural change. He has written extensively in professional journals and his book Equilibrium Unemployment Theory, now in its second edition, is a standard reference in the economics of unemployment.
In 2005 he was awarded the IZA Prize in Labor Economics (jointly with Dale Mortensen) for his work on unemployment and in 2008 he received the Republic of Cyprus “Aristeion” for the Arts, Literature and Science.
In 2009 he served as Vice President of the European Economic Association, and became President Elect in 2010 and to be President in 2011.
In 2010, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics, jointly with Peter A. Diamond and Dale Mortensen, for his contributions to the theory of search frictions and macroeconomics. The first Nobel winner with Cypriot citizenship.
Pissarides’ most influential paper is arguably “Job Creation and Job Destruction in the Theory of Unemployment” (with Dale Mortensen)”, published in the Review of Economic Studies in 1994.[6] This paper built on the previous individual contributions that both authors had been making in the previous two decades. The Mortensen-Pissarides model that resulted from this paper has been exceptionally influential in modern macroeconomics. In one or another of its extensions or variations, today it is part of the core of most graduate economics curricula throughout the world.
He has served as Head of the Economics Department at LSE, and he is an elected Fellow of the British Academy, the Econometric Society, the European Economic Association and the Society of Labor Economists. He is also a member of Council of the European Economic Association and the Econometric Society and a former member of Council of the Royal Economic Society. He is the chairman of the Economica board, and a member of other editorial boards, a research fellow of the Centre of Economic Performance at LSE (and a former head of its Macroeconomics Research Programme), of the Centre for Economic Policy Research (London), and of the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA, Bonn). He is also a Non-National Senior Associate, Forum for Economic Research in the Arab Countries, Iran and Turkey and a former member of the Monetary Policy Committee of the Central Bank of Cyprus (2000-2007). He has served on the European Employment Task Force (2003) and he has been a consultant on employment policy and other labour issues for the World Bank, the European Commission, the Bank of England and the OECD.
Prof. Pissarides provides specialist analysis of the economics of unemployment, labour-market theory, labour-market policy and growth and structural change. Through his work as a research fellow of the Centre of Economic Performance at the LSE, of the Centre for Economic Policy Research (London), and of the Institute for the Study of Labour (IZA, Bonn), he explains the importance of structural change and economic performance as indicators of the strategies required to stimulate economic growth.