Dale T. Mortensen
American economist
- 2 min read
- 5 chapters
Related on Lably
Through Macroeconomics, Economics and Unemployment
Early life and education
Mortensen was born in Enterprise, Oregon. He received his BA in economics from Willamette University in 1961 and his PhD in Economics from Carnegie Mellon University in 1967.
Sign in to keep reading
4 more chapters are free with a Lably account.
Career
Mortensen had been on the faculty of Northwestern University since 1965 and a professor of Managerial Economics and Decision Sciences at the Kellogg School of Management since 1980. He was the Niels Bohr Visiting Professor at the School of Economics and Management, Aarhus University, from 2006 to 2010.
He was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences jointly with Christopher A. Pissarides from the London School of Economics and Peter A. Diamond from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2010 "for their analysis of markets with search frictions". In May 2011, Mortensen was awarded an honorary doctorate from his alma mater, Willamette University. He was married to Beverly Mortensen, also a Northwestern Professor.
Mortensen's research focused on labor economics, macroeconomics and economic theory. He is especially known for his pioneering work on the search and matching theory of frictional unemployment. He extended the insights from this work to study labor turnover and reallocation, research and development, and personal relationships.
Mortensen was a past president of the Society of Economic Dynamics and one of the founding editors of the Review of Economic Dynamics.
Death
Mortensen died of stage 4 lung cancer on January 9, 2014, at the age of 74, at his home in Wilmette. He was buried at Memorial Park Cemetery in Skokie.
In 2019 Mortensen's family donated his Nobel Prize medal to Northwestern University.
Awards, fellowships
- Alexander Henderson Award, 1965
- Fellow, Econometric Society, 1979
- Fellow, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2000
- IZA Prize in Labor Economics, 2005
- Nobel Prize in Economics, 2010; joint with Christopher A. Pissarides and Peter A. Diamond
The Dale T. Mortensen Building
In February 2011, Mortensen had a building named in his honor at Aarhus University. The Dale T. Mortensen Building is the central hub for all international and PhD activities and contains the new PhD House, Dale's Café, the university's International Centre and the new IC Dormitory for international PhD students.