Distinguished CES Fellow Jean Tirole Wins Nobel Prize in Economics

Jean Tirole, Distinguished CES Fellow 1996, Distinguished CES Fellow 1996, has been awarded the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel for 2014. Described by colleagues as "one of the most productive, original and ultimately socially useful economists of his generation," Mr Tirole was honoured by the Academy for his work on market power and regulation, and on taming powerful firms.

In articles and books, Mr Tirole has presented a general framework for designing regulation or competition policy that adapts to every industry's specific conditions. One such book, "Competition in Telecommunications," was published by the Center for Economic Studies (CES) of the Ludwig Maximilians University of Munich, part of the CESifo Group, in connection with his award as Distinguished CES Fellow. He has applied his insights to a number of industries, ranging from telecommunications to banking. "Drawing on these new insights, governments can better encourage powerful firms to become more productive and, at the same time, prevent them from harming competitors and customers," said the Academy.

He studied at the Ecole des Ponts et Chaussées and went on to applied maths at the University of Paris and finally to Economics at MIT, where he received his PhD in 1981. Since then he has oscillated between France and the US, taking up positions at the Ecole Polytechnique, Harvard, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Stanford, University of Lausanne and MIT. He has now settled in Toulouse, where he chairs the board of the Jean-Jacques Laffont Foundation at the Toulouse School of Economics, and is scientific director of the Industrial Economics Institute (IDEI). He was a founding member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse (IAST).

The entire CESifo Group rejoices on his having been awarded the most prestigious prize in the economics profession.