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George Akerlof
George Arthur Akerlof
Born	June 17, 1940 (1940-06-17) (age 67) New Haven, Connecticut
Residence	U.S.
Nationality	American
Field	Economics
Institutions	University of California, Berkeley
Alma mater	MIT (Ph.D.) Yale University (B.A.)
Academic advisor	Robert Solow
Known for	Information asymmetry Efficiency wages
Notable prizes	Nobel Prize in Economics (2001)

George Arthur Akerlof (born June 17, 1940) is an American economist and Koshland Professor of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley. He won the 2001 Nobel Prize in Economics (shared with Michael Spence and Joseph E. Stiglitz). His father was Swedish and his mother a Jewish/German-American.

Akerlof is perhaps best known for his article, "The Market for Lemons: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism", published in Quarterly Journal of Economics in 1970, in which he identified the severe problems that may afflict markets characterized by asymmetrical information.

In Efficiency Wage Models of the Labor Market, Akerlof and coauthor Janet Yellen propose rationales for the efficiency wage hypothesis in which employers pay above the market-clearing wage, in contradiction to the conclusions of neoclassical economics.

In the late 1990's Akerlof's ideas attracted the attention of some on both sides of the debate over legal abortion. In articles appearing in The Quarterly Journal of Economics^[1], The Economic Journal^[2], and other forums Akerlof described a phenomenon that he labeled "Reproductive Technology Shock". He contended that the new technologies that had helped to spawn the late twentieth century sexual revolution, modern contraceptives and legal abortion, had not only failed to suppress the incidence of out-of-wedlock childbearing, they had actually worked to increase it. According to Akerloff these technologies had largely transformed the old paradigm of socio-sexual assumptions, expectations, and behaviors in ways that were especially disadvantageous to women who did not use them. For example, the availability of legal abortion now allowed men to view their offspring as the deliberate product of female choice rather than as the chance product of sexual intercourse. Thus it encouraged biological fathers not only to reject any supposed obligation to marry the mother, but to reject the very idea of paternal obligation.

While Akerlof did not recommend legal restrictions on either abortion or the availability of contraceptives, his analysis seemed to lend support to those who did. Somewhat ironically, a scholar strongly associated with liberal and Democratic-leaning policy positions, has been approvingly cited by conservative and Republican-leaning analysts and commentators.

In The Missing Motivation in Macroeconomics, Akerlof proposed natural norms that decision makers have for how they should behave. In this lecture Akerlof proposed a new agenda for macroeconomics with inclusion of those norms. This is George Akerlof's Presidential Address to the American Economic Association, delivered on January 6th, 2007.

Akerlof graduated from the Lawrenceville School and received his Bachelor's degree from Yale University in 1962, and his Ph.D. from MIT in 1966 and has taught at the London School of Economics. His maternal great-grandfather was born in Oakland, California and was an alumnus of UC Berkeley (Class of 1873). His maternal grandfather was also a Berkeley alumnus. His wife Janet Yellen is president of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco and a professor of economics at UC Berkeley and served on President Bill Clinton's Council of Economic Advisors.

He is a trustee of the Economists for Peace and Security.

• Akerlof, George, and Janet Yellen. 1986. Efficiency Wage Models of the Labor Market. Orlando, Fla.: Academic Press.

• List of economists

• Article on George Akerlof from Yale Economic Review
• Autobiography on Nobel E-museum
• Akerlof's Berkeley webpage
• Homepage
• Akerlof publications
• Akerlof's criticism of Bush
• Akerlof slams Bush government
• Akerlof biography