Host Esteemed Nobel Laureate in Economics

Prof. Finn Erling Kydland is an economist, born in Norway. He studied at the Norwegian School of Economics and Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, where he later joined the Tepper School of Business.

In 2004 he was appointed the Chair in Economics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He shared the 2004 Nobel Prize for Economics with Prof. Edward C Prescott for their contributions to dynamic macroeconomics, specifically the time consistency of economic policy and the driving forces behind business cycles.

Prof. Kydland and Prof. Prescott influenced the monetary and fiscal policies of governments and laid the basis for the increased independence of many central banks, notably those in the United Kingdom, Sweden and New Zealand. The pair demonstrated that technology changes or supply shocks, such as oil price hikes, could be reflected in investment and relative price movements and thereby create short-term fluctuations around the long-term economic growth path.