Becker Friedman Institute for Research in Economics

Last updated
Saieh Hall for Economics, location of the Becker Friedman Institute Saieh Hall for Economics.jpg
Saieh Hall for Economics, location of the Becker Friedman Institute

The Gary Becker Milton Friedman Institute for Research in Economics is a collaborative, cross-disciplinary center for research in economics. The institute was established at the University of Chicago in June 2011. It brought together the activities of two formerly independent economic research centers at the university: the Milton Friedman Institute for Research in Economics and the Becker Center on Chicago Price Theory. [1]

The institute is named for two globally influential economists: Gary S. Becker (1930–2014) and his mentor, Milton Friedman (1912-2006), both winners of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. While they pursued different scholarly paths, Becker and Friedman shared a fundamental belief that economics, grounded in empirical research, is a powerful tool to understand human behavior. While Friedman is known for his lasting contributions to macroeconomics and monetary economics, Becker is recognized for extending microeconomic analysis to a wide range of fields and topics such as marriage, the family, criminal behavior, and racial discrimination. [2]

A collaboration of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, Law School, Department of Economics, and the Harris School of Public Policy, the institute builds bridges across disciplines and subfields of economics. Its research conferences, workshops, and initiatives bring economists and scholars from related fields together to share perspectives and refine ideas. The institute also sponsors an active visiting scholars program and offers programs and support for students and promising young researchers.

The institute supports research initiatives in traditional Chicago strengths such as price theory, law and economics, and human capital, as well as topical inquiries into important policy issues such as fiscal imbalance, systemic risk, policy uncertainty, and economics of the family, and newer areas like field experiments in economics.

The institute is directed by Michael Greenstone. An Institute Research Council of distinguished faculty from collaborating university units advises the institute.

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Friedrich Hayek</span> Austrian-British economist and philosopher (1899–1992)

Friedrich August von Hayek, often referred to by his initials F. A. Hayek, was an Austrian-British academic, who contributed to economics, political philosophy, psychology, and intellectual history. Hayek shared the 1974 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with Gunnar Myrdal for work on money and economic fluctuations, and the interdependence of economic, social and institutional phenomena. His account of how prices communicate information is widely regarded as an important contribution to economics that led to him receiving the prize.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Milton Friedman</span> American economist and statistician (1912–2006)

Milton Friedman was an American economist and statistician who received the 1976 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his research on consumption analysis, monetary history and theory and the complexity of stabilization policy. With George Stigler, Friedman was among the intellectual leaders of the Chicago school of economics, a neoclassical school of economic thought associated with the work of the faculty at the University of Chicago that rejected Keynesianism in favor of monetarism until the mid-1970s, when it turned to new classical macroeconomics heavily based on the concept of rational expectations. Several students, young professors and academics who were recruited or mentored by Friedman at Chicago went on to become leading economists, including Gary Becker, Robert Fogel, and Robert Lucas Jr.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gary Becker</span> American economist (1930–2014)

Gary Stanley Becker was an American economist who received the 1992 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. He was a professor of economics and sociology at the University of Chicago, and was a leader of the third generation of the Chicago school of economics.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Law and economics</span> Application of economic theory to analysis of legal systems

Law and economics, or economic analysis of law, is the application of microeconomic theory to the analysis of law. The field emerged in the United States during the early 1960s, primarily from the work of scholars from the Chicago school of economics such as Aaron Director, George Stigler, and Ronald Coase. The field uses economics concepts to explain the effects of laws, to assess which legal rules are economically efficient, and to predict which legal rules will be promulgated. There are two major branches of law and economics; one based on the application of the methods and theories of neoclassical economics to the positive and normative analysis of the law, and a second branch which focuses on an institutional analysis of law and legal institutions, with a broader focus on economic, political, and social outcomes, and overlapping with analyses of the institutions of politics and governance.

The Chicago school of economics is a neoclassical school of economic thought associated with the work of the faculty at the University of Chicago, some of whom have constructed and popularized its principles. Milton Friedman and George Stigler are considered the leading scholars of the Chicago school.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">University of Chicago Booth School of Business</span> Business school of the University of Chicago

The University of Chicago Booth School of Business is the graduate business school of the University of Chicago, a private research university in Chicago, Illinois. Founded in 1898, Chicago Booth is the second-oldest business school in the U.S. and is associated with 10 Nobel laureates in the Economic Sciences, more than any other business school in the world. The school has the third-largest endowment of any business school.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">George Stigler</span> American economist (1911–1991)

George Joseph Stigler was an American economist. He was the 1982 laureate in Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences and is considered a key leader of the Chicago school of economics.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Armen Alchian</span> American economist (1914–2013)

Armen Albert Alchian was an American economist who made major contributions to microeconomic theory and the theory of the firm. He spent almost his entire career at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and is credited with turning its economics department into one of the country’s best. He is also known as one of the founders of new institutional economics, and widely acknowledged for his work on property rights.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Anna Schwartz</span> American economist (1915–2012)

Anna Jacobson Schwartz was an American economist who worked at the National Bureau of Economic Research in New York City and a writer for The New York Times. Paul Krugman has said that Schwartz is "one of the world's greatest monetary scholars."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lars Peter Hansen</span> American economist

Lars Peter Hansen is an American economist. He is the David Rockefeller Distinguished Service Professor in Economics, Statistics, and the Booth School of Business, at the University of Chicago and a 2013 recipient of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">John A. List</span> American economist

John August List is an American economist known for his work in establishing field experiments as a tool in empirical economic analysis. Since 2016, he has served as the Kenneth C. Griffin Distinguished Service Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago, where he was Chairman of the Department of Economics from 2012 to 2018. Since 2016, he has also served as Visiting Robert F. Hartsook Chair in Fundraising at the Lilly Family School of Philanthropy at Indiana University. In 2011, List was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in 2011, he was elected a Fellow of the Econometric Society.

<i>EconTalk</i> Podcast

EconTalk is a weekly economics podcast hosted by Russ Roberts. Roberts, formerly an economics professor at George Mason University, is a research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. On the podcast, Roberts typically interviews a single guest—often professional economists—on topics in economics. The podcast is hosted by the Library of Economics and Liberty, an online library sponsored by Liberty Fund. On EconTalk Roberts has interviewed more than a dozen Nobel Prize laureates including Nobel Prize in Economics recipients Ronald Coase, Milton Friedman, Gary Becker, and Joseph Stiglitz as well as Nobel Prize in Physics recipient Robert Laughlin.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Russ Roberts</span> American economist

Russell David "Russ" Roberts is an American-Israeli economist. He is currently a research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution and president of Shalem College in Jerusalem. He is known for communicating economic ideas in understandable terms as host of the EconTalk podcast.

Between 2008 and 2011, the Milton Friedman Institute for Research in Economics was an academic center established at the University of Chicago as a collaborative, cross-disciplinary site for research in economics.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Outline of economics</span> Overview of and topical guide to economics

The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to economics:

<span class="mw-page-title-main">David R. Henderson</span> Canadian-American economist

David Richard Henderson is a Canadian-born American economist and author who moved to the United States in 1972 and became a U.S. citizen in 1986, serving on President Ronald Reagan's Council of Economic Advisers from 1982 to 1984. A research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution since 1990, he took a teaching position with the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California in 1984, and is now an emeritus professor of economics.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">David I. Meiselman</span> American economist

David I. Meiselman was an American economist. Among his contributions to the field of economics are his work on the term structure of interest rates, the foundation today of the implementation of monetary policy by major central banks, and his work with Milton Friedman on the impact of monetary policy on the performance of the economy and inflation.

Price Theory: A Provisional Text is an economics book by Milton Friedman.

References

  1. "Becker Friedman Institute established at University of Chicago". June 17, 2011.
  2. Nelson, Robert H. (2001). Economics as Religion . Pennsylvania State University Press. p.  194.

41°47′24″N87°35′52″W / 41.789936°N 87.597687°W / 41.789936; -87.597687