Joel Mokyr

Joel Mokyr is the Robert H. Strotz Professor of Arts and Sciences and Professor of Economics and History at Northwestern University, and Sackler Professor at the Eitan Berglas School of Economics at the University of Tel Aviv. He specializes in economic history and the economics of technological change and population change. His is the author of more than 100 articles and books.  His work has been awarded numerous prizes, including the Joseph Schumpeter memorial prize, the Ranki prize for the best book in European Economic history, the Donald Price Prize of the American Political Science Association and the Allan Sharlin Prize of the Social Science History Association.

 

He has served as editor of the Journal of Economic History and editor in chief of the Oxford Encyclopedia of Economic History, and currently serves as editor in chief of the Princeton University Press Economic History of the Western World book series. He has served as President of the Economic History Association, the Midwest Economics Association, and the Atlantic Economic Association, and is a director of the National Bureau of Economic Research. He serves as chair of the advisory committee of the Institutions, Organizations, and Growth program of the Canadian Institute of Advanced Research. Previously, he served as chair of the Economics Department at Northwestern University, and held a fellowship at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University.

 

Professor Mokyr has an undergraduate degree from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a Ph.D. from Yale University. He has taught at Northwestern since 1974, and has been a visiting Professor at Harvard, the University of Chicago, Stanford University, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the University of Tel Aviv, University College of Dublin, and the University of Manchester. In 2006 he was awarded the biennial Heineken Prize by the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences for a lifetime achievement in historical science. In 2015 he was awarded the Balzan Prize for Economic History, awarded once every twenty years.

 

He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a foreign fellow of the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences, the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, a corresponding fellow of the British Academy, and a Fellow of the Econometric Society, the Cliometric Society, the Economic History Association, and a distinguished fellow of the American Economic Association. He was made a doctor honoris causa by the National University of Uruguay in 2018.