Edmund Strother Phelps (July 26, 1933 – May 15, 2026) was an American economist and the recipient of the 2006 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.
Early in his career, he became known for his research at Yale's Cowles Foundation in the first half of the 1960s on the sources of economic growth. His demonstration of the golden rule savings rate, a concept related to work by John von Neumann, started a wave of research on how much a nation should spend on present consumption rather than save and invest for future generations.
Phelps was at the University of Pennsylvania from 1966 to 1971 and moved to Columbia University in 1971. His most seminal work inserted a microfoundation, one featuring imperfect information, incomplete knowledge and expectations about wages and prices, to support a macroeconomic theory of employment determination and price-wage dynamics. That led to his development of the natural rate of unemployment: its existence and the mechanism governing its size. In the early 2000s, he turned to the study of business innovation.
From 2001 he was the founding director of Columbia's Center on Capitalism and Society. He was McVickar Professor of Political Economy at Columbia from 1982 to 2021. On January 1, 2022, his title changed to McVickar Professor Emeritus of Political Economy.
Early life and education Phelps was born on July 26, 1933, in Evanston, Illinois. When he was six, he moved with his family to Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, where he spent his school years. In 1951, he went to Amherst College for his undergraduate education. On his father's advice, Phelps enrolled in his first economics course in his second year at Amherst. Economist James Nelson gave the course, which was based on the famous textbook Economics by Paul Samuelson. Phelps was strongly impressed with the possibility of applying formal analysis to business. He quickly became aware of an important unsolved problem with the existing economic theory and the existing gap between microeconomics and macroeconomics.
After receiving his B.A. at Amherst in 1955, Phelps went to Yale University for graduate studies. At Yale, he studied under future Nobel laureates James Tobin and Thomas Schelling, among others. Phelps was also strongly influenced by William Fellner whose course emphasized the expectations of agents. Phelps received his Ph.D. in Economics from Yale in 1959.
Research in 1960s and 1970s After receiving his Ph.D., Phelps went to work as an economist for the RAND Corporation. However, feeling he could not pursue macroeconomics at RAND (which focused on defense work), Phelps decided to return to the academic world. In 1960, he took a research position at the Cowles Foundation while he was also teaching at Yale. At the Cowles Foundation, his research focused mainly on neoclassical growth theory, following the seminal work of Robert Solow. As part of his research, in 1961 Phelps published a famous paper"The Golden Rule of Accumulation: a Fable for Growthmen"; The American Economic Review, Vol. 51, No. 4, pp. 638–43, 1961 http://www.policonomics.com/wp-content/uploads/The-Golden-Rule-of-Accumulation-a-Fable-for-Growthmen.pdf"The Golden Rule of Capital Accumulation" (see Bibliography) on the Golden Rule savings rate, one of his major contributions to economic science. He also wrote papers dealing with other areas of economic theory, such as monetary economics or Ricardian equivalence and its relation to optimal growth.
His position at Cowles gave Phelps the chance to interact with Arthur Okun and other notables in the field. He was able to collaborate with other top economists working on growth theory, including David Cass and fellow future Nobel prize laureates Tjalling Koopmans. During the 1962–63 academic year, Phelps visited MIT, where he was in contact with future Nobel Prize winners Paul Samuelson, Robert Solow, and Franco Modigliani.
In 1966, Phelps left Yale and moved to the University of Pennsylvania to take up a tenured position as a professor of economics. At Penn, Phelps's research focused mainly on the link between employment, wage setting and inflation. His first pioneering paper on this topic was in 1967Phelps, Edmund S (1967): "Phillips Curves, Expectations of Inflation and Optimal Unemployment Over Time," Economica, August, Vol 34, No 135, pp 254–81. - https://www.jstor.org/stable/2552305 . In this paper he developed a rigorous model of the Expectations Augmented Phillips Curve. He worked out solution values for many macro variables by maximizing the discounted value of social welfare utility function, bases on inflation and unemployment. Phelps (1967) labelled U* in his model as the equilibrium unemployment rate and also the warranted rate, but himself later started using the term natural rate.Moorthy, Vivek: (2026) "Phelps's Contributions and Labour Market Research." Economic and Political Weekly 61(28), 11 July. https://www.epw.in/journal/2026/28/commentary/phelpss-contributions-and-labour-market-research.html (Moorthy 2026)
In his next and more influential 1968Phelps, Edmund S (1968): "Money–Wage Dynamics and Labor-market Equilibrium," Journal of Political Economy, Vol 76, No 4, Part 2, pp 678–711. https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/259438 paper "Money-Wage Dynamics and Labor Market Equilibrium" Phelps laid out his framework.. In Phelps's model, since there may be involuntary unemployment even at the natural rate, a full catch-up for money wages in response to price increases may not hold. Money wage dynamics are largely driven by the decisions of firms.
The research contributed important insights in the microeconomics of the Phillips curve, including the role of expectations (in the form of adaptive expectations) and imperfect information in the setting of wages and prices. It also introduced the concept of the natural rate of unemployment and argued that labor market equilibrium is independent of the rate of inflation and so there is no long-run tradeoff between unemployment and inflation. That, if accurate, would have the crucial implication that the Keynesian policy of demand management has only transitory effects and so cannot be used to control the long-term rate of unemployment in the economy. In January 1969, Phelps organized a conference at Penn in support of the research on the microfoundations of inflation and employment determination. The conference papers were published the next year in a bookMicroeconomic Foundations of Employment and Inflation Theory by Phelps et al. (see Bibliography) that had a strong and lasting influence; it became known as the "Phelps volume".The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (2006), "Edmund Phelps's Contributions to Macroeconomics" Along with his research on the Phillips curve, Phelps also collaborated with other economists on research regarding economic growth, the effects of monetary and fiscal policy, and optimal population growth.
In the following years, an element in Phelps's foundations came under heavy criticism with the introduction of John Muth's rational expectations, which was popularized by future Nobel prize winner Robert Lucas, Jr. Phelps, with Calvo and John Taylor, started a program to rebuild Keynesian economics with rational expectations by employing sticky wages and prices. They did so by explicitly incorporating in models the fact that wage contracts are set in advance for multiple periods, an idea originating from Phelps's 1968 paper. This research led to a paper published with Taylor in 1977,"Stabilizing Powers of Monetary Policy under Rational Expectations" (see Bibliography) proving that staggered wage setting gives monetary policy a role in stabilizing economic fluctuations. The use of staggered wage and price setting, further developed by Calvo in a 1983 paper, became a cornerstone of New Keynesian economics. During the 1970s, Phelps and Calvo also collaborated on research on optimal contracts under asymmetric information.
Phelps spent 1969–70 at the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Science at Stanford University. Discussions with fellow futire Nobel prize winners Amartya Sen and Kenneth Arrow and especially the influence of the philosophy of John Rawls, whom he met during the year at the center, led Phelps to undertake some research outside macroeconomics. As a result, in 1972, he published seminal research in the new field that he named statistical discrimination."The Statistical Theory of Racism and Sexism" (see Bibliography) He also published research on economic justice, applying ideas from Rawls's A Theory of Justice.
In 1971, Phelps moved to the Economics Department at Columbia University, which also included future Nobel prize winners William Vickrey and James J. Heckman (future laureate Robert Mundell joined three years later), as well as Phoebus Dhrymes, Guillermo Calvo, and John B. Taylor. There, he published research on the inflation tax and the impact of fiscal policy on optimal inflation. In 1972, Phelps published a new book"Inflation Policy and Unemployment Theory" (see Bibliography) which focused on the derivation of policy implications of his new theory. The book further popularized his "expectations-augmented Phillips curve" and introduced the concept of hysteresis with regard to unemployment (prolonged unemployment is partially irreversible as workers lose skill and become demoralized).
In the late 1970s, Phelps and one of his former students, Roman Frydman, conducted some research on the implications of assuming rational expectations, at first independently and then in collaboration. Their results suggested that rational expectations are not the correct way to model agents' expectations. They organized a conference on the issue in 1981 and published the proceedings in a 1983 book."Individual Forecasting and Aggregate Outcomes" (see Bibliography) However, as rational expectations were becoming the standard in macroeconomics, the book was initially received with hostility and was largely ignored. The 2008 financial crisis, along with the failure of rational expectations models to predict it, led to a renewed interest in the work.
Research in 1980s In 1982, he was appointed the McVickar Professor of Political Economy at Columbia University. During the early 1980s, he wrote an introductory textbook synthesizing contemporary economics knowledge. The book, Political Economy, was published in 1985 but had limited classroom adoption.
In the 1980s, Phelps increased collaboration with European universities and institutions, including Banca d'Italia, where he spent most of his 1985–86 sabbatical, and Observatoire Français des Conjonctures Économiques (OFCE) in Paris. He became interested in the puzzle of the persistent high unemployment in Europe, despite there not being any pause in inflation and published on the subject with Jean-Paul Fitoussi (the director of OFCE).Fitoussi, Jean-Paul and Edmund S. Phelps (1988). The Slump in Europe: Open Economy Theory Reconstructed. Basil Blackwell. Further study led Phelps to believe that it is not a transitory phenomenon but the effect of changes in equilibrium unemployment. During the following years, Phelps tried to build a theory to determine endogenously the natural rate of unemployment. He published partial research results in a 1994 book, Structural Slumps: The Modern Equilibrium Theory of Employment, Interest and Assets. Phelps also collaborated closely with Luigi Paganetto at the University of Rome Tor Vergata and, between 1988 and 1998, as co-organizers of the Villa Mondragone International Seminar.
Research in 1990s