Michael Spence

Spence joined the faculty of New York University's Stern School of Business on September 1, 2010. He joined the faculty of SDA Bocconi School of Management in Italy in July 2011.

He is the author of three books and 50 articles, and has also been a consistent contributor to Project Syndicate, an international newspaper syndicate, since 2008. Among his beliefs are that high-frequency trading should be banned.

Together with George A. Akerlof and Joseph E. Stiglitz, Spence is a co-recipient of the 2001 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, "for their analyses of markets with asymmetric information."

Spence is an Honorary Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, where he studied as a Rhodes Scholar. He was the recipient of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2001, as well as the John Bates Clark Medal from the American Economics Association in 1981.

He stepped down as Dean of the Stanford Graduate School of Business in 1999 and joined Oak Hill Capital Partners. He is the Chairman of the Commission on Growth and Development, and a distinguished visiting fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Spence had both Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer in a graduate-level economics class at Harvard. In a 1999 Fortune interview, however, Gates and Ballmer admitted not attending class and passing only after cramming for four days before the final.

Spence was elected as a Fellow of the Econometric Society in 1976 and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1983.

Spence attended Princeton University as an undergraduate student and graduated summa cum laude with a B.A. in philosophy in 1966, completing a senior thesis titled "Freedom and Determinism". Spence then studied at Magdalen College, University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, and received a B.A./M.A. in mathematics in 1968. Spence then began graduate studies in economics at Harvard University with the support of a Danforth Graduate Fellowship in the fall of 1968. He received a Ph.D. in economics in 1972, completing a dissertation titled "Market signalling" under the supervision of Kenneth Arrow and Thomas C. Schelling. Spence was awarded the David A. Wells Prize for outstanding doctoral dissertation in 1972.

Andrew Michael Spence (born November 7, 1943) is a Canadian-American economist and Nobel laureate.

He is a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution and the Philip H. Knight Professor Emeritus of Management in the Graduate School of Business. Spence is also a Commissioner for the Global Commission on Internet Governance. Additionally, Spence is also a member of the Berggruen Institute's 21st Century Council.