Dale Mortensen, 1939-2014

Dale Mortensen, Nobelist for Labor Market Work, Dies at 74

Here's the short bio from his website:

Dale T. Mortensen 

is the Board of Trustees Professor of Economics at Northwestern University, a visiting Professor of Economics at Aarhus University, a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), and a research fellow of the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA). Professor Mortensen received his B.A. in Economics from Willamette University in 1961 and his Ph.D. in Economics from Carnegie-Mellon University in 1967. Mortensen is a fellow of Econometrica Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Society of Labor Economics, and the European Economic Association.  He was awarded the IZA Labor Economics Prize in 2005 and the Society of Labor Economics Mincer Prize in 2007. In 2008 he was elected an American Economic Association Distinguished Fellow. Together with Peter Diamond and Christopher Pissarides he was awarded the 2010Sveriges Riksbank (Nobel) Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, 2010 for their contributions to the analysis of “markets with search friction.” In 2013 he was elected as a member of the National Academy of Science and the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters.

 

Mortensen pioneered the theory of search and search unemployment and extended it to study labor turnover, personal relationships, and labor reallocation. His insight, that friction is equivalent to the random arrival of trading partners, has become the leading technique for analysis of labor markets and the effects of labor market policy. The development of equilibrium dynamic models designed to account for wage dispersion, the time series behaviour of job and worker flows, and the role of reallocation in the determination of aggregate growth and productivity are the principal topics of his current research. His publications include over fifty scientific articles. His books include Wage Dispersion: Why Are Similar Workers Paid Differently?, published by MIT Press in 2003, and Job Matching, Wage Dispersion, and Unemployment (jointly authored with Christopher A. Pissarides),published by Oxford University Press in 2011.