Michael Spence

For other people named Michael Spence, see Michael Spence (disambiguation).

Michael Spence
Born	(1943-11-07) November 7, 1943 Montclair, New Jersey, USA
Nationality	United States
Institution	Harvard University Stanford University SDA Bocconi School of Management New York University
Field	Microeconomics, labor economics
Alma mater	Harvard University, (Ph.D.) University of Oxford, (B.A.) Princeton University, (B.A.)
Influences	Kenneth Arrow Thomas Schelling Richard Zeckhauser
Contributions	Signaling theory
Awards	John Bates Clark Medal (1981) Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics (2001)
Information at IDEAS / RePEc

Andrew Michael Spence (born November 7, 1943, Montclair, New Jersey) is an American economist and recipient of the 2001 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, along with George Akerlof and Joseph E. Stiglitz, for their work on the dynamics of information flows and market development.

Career

Spence is probably most famous for his job-market signaling model, which essentially triggered the enormous volume of literature in this branch of contract theory. In this model, employees signal their respective skills to employers by acquiring a certain degree of education, which is costly to them. Employers will pay higher wages to more educated employees, because they know that the proportion of employees with high abilities is higher among the educated ones, as it is less costly for them to acquire education than it is for employees with low abilities. For the model to work, it is not even necessary for education to have any intrinsic value if it can convey information about the sender (employee) to the recipient (employer) and if the signal is costly.

Spence did his middle and high school education at the University of Toronto Schools of the University of Toronto. In 1966, he was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford University upon graduation from Princeton University with a degree in Philosophy. He studied Mathematics at Oxford. Spence is a former Dean of the Stanford Graduate School of Business and is the Chairman of the Commission on Growth and Development.

Spence joined the faculty of New York University's Stern School of Business on September 1, 2010.

He is a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Spence is also a Commissioner for the Global Commission on Internet Governance.

He has also been a consistent contributor to Project Syndicate, an international newspaper syndicate, since 2008. Among his beliefs are that high-frequency trading should be banned.

Spence has been credited as Bill Gates's most influential teacher.

Honors and awards

Spence is an Honorary Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, where he studied as a Rhodes Scholar.

See also

• List of economists

External links

• Michael Spence Senior Fellow at Hoover Institution, Stanford University
• A World of Underinvestment (May 2015), Project Syndicate
• Labor’s Digital Displacement (May 2014), Project Syndicate
• Signaling in Retrospect and the Informational Structure of Markets 2001 lecture at NobelPrize.org
• Profile and Papers at Research Papers in Economics/RePEc
• Works by or about Michael Spence in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
• Archive of Michael Spence articles on Project Syndicate
• Appearances on C-SPAN

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