George Arthur Akerlof is an American economist who is a university professor at the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University and Koshland Professor of Economics Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley.
Akerlof is perhaps best known for his article, “The Market for Lemons: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism”, published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics in 1970, in which he identified certain severe problems that afflict markets characterized by asymmetric information, the paper for which he was awarded.
Who is George Akerlof’s son?
Akerlof is married to Janet Yellen, an economist who is the current United States secretary of the treasury and former chair of the Federal Reserve, as well as a professor emeritus at Berkeley’s Haas School of Business.
The couple has a son called Robert, who was born in 1981. Robert Akerlof is also an economist, earned a bachelor’s degree in economics and mathematics from Yale and a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard, currently working as an associate professor of economics at the University of Warwick.