2006 Nobel Laureate in Economics Edmund S. Phelps was conferred the title of honorary professorship fromTsinghuaUniversityonSeptember 12, 2007. The conferring ceremony was held at the lecture hall of theMainBuildingof the University, hosted by Professor Bai Chong-en, Chair of the Department of Economics ofSchoolofEconomicsand Management. Witnessed by nearly 500 Tsinghua faculty members and students, Professor Xie Weihe, Vice President of Tsinghua University conferred the title of honorary professorship to the distinguished economist.

In his answering remarks, Professor Phelps said it’s “an unusual honor” for him to receive a professorship from such a distinguished university-TsinghuaUniversity, and he was impressed by Tsinghua’s vitality and enthusiasm. He said he would like to help with creating some links between Tsinghua and his own university-Columbia University,U.S.

Edmund S. Phelps was born in1933 inChicagoand grew up inHastings-on-Hudson,N.Y.He received his B.A. atAmherstCollegein 1955 and his Ph.D. at Yale in 1959. After several years atPennsylvaniaand Yale, he became Professor of Economics atColumbiain 1971 and McVickar Professor of Political Economy in 1982. He is the founding director of the Center on Capitalism and Society, formed in 2001 and now in the Earth Institute atColumbia.

A common thread running through Phelps’s work is his effort to put people – as we know them – into economic models. He has sought to take account of the incompleteness of their information and their knowledge and to study the effect of their expectations and beliefs on market outcomes. He has taken this perspective in studying the volume of unemployment, the rate of economic growth and, relatedly, job satisfaction and its centrality in people’s lives.

Phelps is the recipient of the 2006 Nobel Prize in Economic Science. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences (USA) in 1981at age 47. He is a fellow of theAmericanAcademyof Arts and Sciences and of the Econometric Society. In 2000 he was made a Distinguished Fellow of the American Economic Association. He was awarded honorary doctorates fromAmherstCollegein 1985,UniversityofRome‘Tor Vergata’ in 2001,UniversityofMannheimin 2001, Universidade Nova ofLisbonin 2003,UniversityofParis-Dauphineand theUniversityofIcelandin 2004, and Institut d’Etudes des Sciences Politiques de Paris (“Sciences Po”) in 2006. He has several honorary professorships fromChina. In 2003 Princeton University Press published a 600 page Festschrift volume, P. Aghion, R. Frydman, J. E. Stiglitz and M. Woodford, eds. Knowledge, Information and Expectations in Modern Economics in his honor.

After the conferring ceremony, Professor Xie Weihe presented Professor Phelps with a souvenir on behalf of the University.

The 2006 Nobel Laureate then delivered a speech entitled “my career”, sharing Tsinghua students with his rich experience in his academic exploration.