Jerry R. Green

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An economic theorist, Jerry R. Green is the John Leverett Professor in the University and the David A. Wells Professor of Political Economy in the Department of Economics at Harvard University, where he began his academic career in 1970. His work spans choice under uncertainty, incentive theory, and applied topics in public economics and finance. He is known for his scholarship on the theory of rational expectations equilibria and mechanism design theory.

At Radcliffe, Green and Daniel Andres Hojman will develop methods of assessing economic welfare that work even when people are not fully rational. Traditional economic theory presumes that decisions are never self-contradictory and measures well-being accordingly. An overwhelming accumulation of evidence, however, points toward irrationality as the norm; hence the need for new methods if economics is to remain policy-relevant. The Green-Hojman approach is to model choice behavior as a compromise between competing objectives, all of which should be respected to some extent in the analysis of welfare.

Green earned his BA in mathematics and his PhD in economics at the University of Rochester. He is a fellow of the Econometric Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a senior fellow in Harvard University’s Society of Fellows. He is also an overseas fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge, and has held fellowships at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. He has chaired the economics department at and been provost of Harvard University.