Michael Rothschild

For other uses, see Michael Rothschild (disambiguation).

Michael Rothschild

Born	August 2, 1942 (1942-08-02) (age 69) Chicago, Illinois
Nationality	United States
Institution	Department of Economics, University of California, Los Angeles
Field	Microeconomics, public economics
Alma mater	MIT (Ph.D., 1969) Yale University (M.A., 1965) Reed College (B.A., 1963)
Information at IDEAS/RePEc

Michael Rothschild (born August 2, 1942 in Chicago, Illinois, USA) is an American economist; he is visiting professor at the Department of Economics of the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA) and a former dean at Princeton.

Education

Rothschild holds a Bachelor of Arts in Anthropology from Reed College (1963), and a Master of Arts in International Relations from Yale University (1965). He earned his Doctor of Philosophy in Economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1969).

Academic career

He was the William Stuart Tod Professor of Economics and Public Affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. He was dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University from 1995 through 2001. Rothschild has written on asymmetric information, decision-making under uncertainty, demography, investment, taxation, finance, and jury-decision processes.

He co-authored one of the most important papers in economics, Equilibrium in Competitive Insurance Markets: An Essay on the Economics of Imperfect Information,^[1] with Joseph Stiglitz. This paper gives the first systematic exposition of the problem of cherry picking when insurance companies compete for customers. In Increasing Risk I: A definition,^[2] Rothschild and Stiglitz introduced the important decision theory concept of the mean-preserving spread, which leads to a partial ordering of probability distributions according to degree of risk.
In 2001, the laureates of the Nobel Prize in Economics were George A. Akerlof, A. Michael Spence as well as J. E. Stiglitz "for their analyses of markets with asymmetric information". So one could say, Rothschild contributed to these prize.^[3][4]

External links

• Official homepage at UCLA, CV
• Website at Princeton

References

1. ^ M. Rothschild, J. E. Stiglitz: "Equilibrium in Competitive Insurance Markets: An Essay on the Economics of Imperfect Information", Quarterly Journal of Economics, 90, 1976, 629–649.
2. ^ M. Rothschild, J. E. Stiglitz: "Increasing risk I: A definition", Journal of Economic Theory, 1970, 225–243.
3. ^ Laureates of the Nobel Prize in Economics, J. E. Stiglitz, 1st paragraph.
4. ^ Advanced information on the 2001 Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (PDF file; 358 kB).

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Name	Rothschild, Michael
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Date of birth	August 2, 1942
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