Christopher Pissarides life and biography

Christopher Antoniou Pissarides is a Cypriot economist. He currently holds the Norman Sosnow Chair in Economics at the London School of Economics.

British and Cypriot economist Christopher Pissarides has studied the macroeconomics of labor markets, structural change, and economic growth. His principle research has been in the economics of unemployment, focusing on job flows, the microeconomic impact of being out of work, and other aspects of the job market. He wrote the influential 1994 paper "Job Creation and Job Destruction in the Theory of Unemployment", co-authored by Dale Mortensen, and won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2010, sharing the accolade and 10 million Swedish kronor (US $1.5M) honorarium with Mortensen and Peter Diamond.

Pissarides has created economic modeling to show what happens to a person who loses his or her job, and analyzed how assorted economic factors and government policy decisions impact the duration of unemployment among idled workers. "Until we began the work," he said upon winning the Nobel honor, "there was no way of thinking about these issues." His findings generally call for low, limited-time unemployment benefits, on the concern that longer or more lucrative payments encourage higher unemployment and longer out-of-work times. He has explained that "one of the key things" uncovered in his research is "that it is important to make sure that people do not stay unemployed too long". He has taught at the London School of Economics since the mid-1970s.

Author of books:

Labour Market Adjustment (1976)
Equilibrium Unemployment Theory (1990)

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