Christopher A. Pissarides
British-Cypriot economist
- 2 min read
- 3 chapters
Related on Lably
Through Macroeconomics, Economic growth and Economic policy
Early life
Pissarides was born in Nicosia, Cyprus, into a Greek Orthodox family from the village of Agros. He first studied at the Pancyprian Gymnasium in Nicosia. After serving in the Cypriot National Guard, he attended the University of Essex, where he received undergraduate and graduate degrees in economics. He then studied at the London School of Economics, where he received a PhD in economics, writing a thesis titled Individual behaviour in markets with imperfect information under the supervision of Michio Morishima.
Sign in to keep reading
2 more chapters are free with a Lably account.
Career
Pissarides is Regius Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics, where he has taught since 1976. He is chairman of the Centre for Macroeconomics, which deploys economists from the University of Cambridge, the London School of Economics, the University College London, the Bank of England, and the National Institute of Economic and Social Research.
He has held a lectureship at the University of Southampton (1974–76), and visiting professorships at Harvard University (1979–80) and the University of California, Berkeley (1990–91).
He served as the chairman of the National Economy Council of the Republic of Cyprus during the country's financial crisis in 2012, and resigned to focus on his academic work at the end of 2014.
In 2018, in collaboration with Naomi Climer and Anna Thomas, he founded the Institute for the Future of Work, a London-based research and development institute exploring how new technologies transform work and working lives.
In February 2020, Greek prime minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis appointed Pissarides to the chairmanship of a committee tasked with drafting a long-term growth strategy for the country. Since September 2020 he has been chairman of the economic council of EuroAfrica Interconnector.
In June 2021, it was announced that he would lead a review into the future of work and wellbeing, a three-year collaboration between the Institute for the Future of Work, Imperial College London, and Warwick Business School, funded by a £1.8 million grant from the Nuffield Foundation. The Pissarides Review into the Future of Work and Wellbeing was launched in March 2022.
Academic contributions
One of Pissarides' papers, "Job Creation and Job Destruction in the Theory of Unemployment" (with Dale Mortensen), was published in the Review of Economic Studies in 1994. He has also written the book Equilibrium Unemployment Theory, a study of the macroeconomics of unemployment.