Joseph E. Stiglitz, who received his PHD from MIT in 1967, has taught at Princeton, Stanford, MIT and was the Drummond Professor and a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. Stiglitz served on President Clinton's economic team in the mid-1990s and then joined the World Bank as chief economist and senior vice president. In 2001, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics for his analyses of markets with asymmetric information, and he was a lead author of the 1995 Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. As University Professor at Columbia University, he is also the founder and Co-President of the Initiative for Policy Dialogue, and a member and former chair of its Committee on Global Thought. In 2011, Time named him one of the world’s 100 most influential people. In 2012, he was awarded the French Legion of Honor.

Stiglitz helped create a new branch of economics, "The Economics of Information," exploring the consequences of information asymmetries and pioneering such pivotal concepts as adverse selection and moral hazard, which have now become standard tools not only of theorists, but of policy analysts. He has made major contributions to macroeconomics and monetary theory, to development economics and trade theory, to public and corporate finance, to the theories of industrial organization and rural organization, and to the theories of welfare economics and of income and wealth distribution. His work has helped explain the circumstances in which markets do not work well, and how selective government intervention can improve their performance.

He is the author most recently of The Price of Inequality: How Today’s Divided Society Endangers Our Future.