John Geanakoplos 101: Who is the Famous American Economist? in our article of Zatrun.com, we will cover in detail everything you need to know about John Geanakoplos, the famous American economist that our readers are curious about.
Who is John Geanakoplos?
John Geanakoplos is an American economist born on March 18, 1955, and is currently the James Tobin Professor of Economics at Yale University. He comes from a Greek-American family of scholars.
His father, Deno Geanakoplos (Greek: Κωνσταντίνος Γιαννακόπουλος), is a renowned Greek-American historian of Byzantine culture and religion who is known as a retired professor at Yale University, and his mother, Effie Geanakoplos, is a psychiatry teacher at the Yale Child Study Center. In 1970, John Geanakoplos won the U.S. Junior Open Chess Championship.
In 1975, he graduated from Yale University with the highest honors in the mathematics department and obtained his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in mathematics and economics under the supervision of Kenneth Arrow and Jerry Green at Harvard University in 1980. He began his career as an assistant professor of economics at Yale University in 1980 and was promoted to associate professor in 1983, full professor in 1986, and James Tobin Professor of Economics in 1994.
Career Life
Between 1996 and 2005, Geanakoplos served as the Director of the Cowles Foundation for Economic Research. He also joined the Yale Hellenic Studies Program, which he co-directs and co-founded in 2002. He was elected as a member of the Econometric Society in 1990 and as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1999. In 1999, he received the Samuelson Award and won the first Bodossaki Economics Prize for the best Greek-origin economist under the age of 40 in 1994.
He directed the economics program at the Santa Fe Institute from 1990 to 1991 and from 1999 to 2000, and he still serves as an external professor and chairman of the science steering committee. He testified before the Congress and Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission in 2009-2010. He also served as a visiting professor at MSRI, the University of California, Berkeley, Churchill College, Cambridge, the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard, Stanford, and MIT. He worked as a fixed-income research manager at Kidder, Peabody & Co. from 1990 to 1994. In 1995, he became a founding partner of Ellington Management Group, where he remains a partner.
John Geanakoplos and His Researches
John Geanakoplos is an economist who worked with Paul Klemperer and Jeremy Bulow in the 1980s and played a significant role in developing and inventing the concept and terminology of Strategic Complements, which is widely used in game theory, industrial organization, and other fields.
Before the financial crisis of the late 2000s, Geanakoplos was known for his significant contributions to the general equilibrium theory, particularly in the area of incomplete markets in general equilibrium theory. For example, Geanakoplos and Polemarchakis (1986) determined important asset and welfare implications in a general incomplete market model.
Since the start of the financial crisis of the late 2000s, Geanakoplos’s work on the relationship between leverage and asset prices, called the “Leverage Cycle,” has become prominent in popular and academic debates about financial market fluctuations and regulation. In 2009, Geanakoplos co-authored a study on credit cards and inflation through the Cowles Foundation with mathematical economist and Yale University professor Pradeep Dubey.
