EDMUND S. PHELPS

An American professor of political economy at Columbia University. Born in 1933 in Evanston, Ill., Phelps has a Ph.D. from Yale and won the 2006 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics for his research on intertemporal trade-offs in macroeconomic policy and the link between employment, wage setting and inflation. Before accepting a tenured position at Columbia, he taught at Yale and the University of Pennsylvania.

Phelps' macroeconomic research focuses on unemployment and inclusion, economic growth, business swings and economic dynamism. One of Phelps major contributions to economics was the insight he provided on the interaction between inflation and unemployment. In particular, Phelps described how current inflation is reliant on expectations about future inflation as well as unemployment.