35. Christopher A. Pissarides (1948–)

A part of this chapter is a translation of a survey previously written by the author (Wasmer 2011) reproduced here with the permission of, and with thanks to, the editor of Revue d’Économie Politique. I also thank Christian Haefke and Etienne Lalé for a discussion on the first draft and Rachel Ngai and Claudio Michelacci for insightful exchanges. Samuel Fitoussi provided valuable assistance with the translation. All remaining errors are mine.

Credit for this anecdote should be given to Rachel Ngai. The chapter, according to Chris, was Karlin (1962).

Stigler (1961, 1962) assumed the dispersion of prices and salaries. Only the distribution is known to economic agents. To have access to a draw from the distribution (obtain an exchange possibility, purchase a good or respond to a job offer), agents must pay a cost, which can either be a direct cost, a sampling cost or simply the cost of waiting for a new offer. Offers come in randomly and their dispersion is exogenous.

This discussion may not pay full justice to the considerable impact of the meeting at the University of Pennsylvania in January 1969 of nearly all the contributors to the classic Phelps (1970), as highlighted in a 2006 Nobel Prize-related ‘scientific background’ release about Phelps: ‘Phelps’s work here is a precursor of the search and matching theory of unemployment, where Peter Diamond, Dale Mortensen, and Christopher Pissarides have made especially important contributions’ (Kungl. Vetenskapsakademien 2006: 8). As a matter of fact—I thank Chris for this insight—the class of models in the so-called Phelps volume was criticised. To quote Chris from his Nobel Lecture (Pissarides 2011: 1092): ‘The articles in the Phelps volume, however, especially those by Phelps (1970) and Dale Mortensen (1970) which had explicit models of the Phillips curve, required a wage distribution to obtain the microfoundations of the Phillips curve. As Peter Diamond (1971) and Michael Rothschild (1973) pointed out, this was not consistent with the other assumptions of the models’.

Pissarides (1997).

‘To resolve these questions, we only have two important further pieces of information—the behaviour of inflation and the behaviour of vacancies. Thus, roughly speaking, we increase our knowledge by almost 50% when we bring in vacancies’ (Layard 1986: 541).

As an illustration, the word ‘Europe’ appears 36 times in his resume (covering panels, associations, policy forums, article titles and discussions), whereas America, United States and USA appear only 12 times, mostly for journals and more rarely with respect to policy discussions.

Chris was apparently aware of the simplification and had revised the paper accordingly, but the 1984 publication (Pissarides 1984b) was a conference volume, and the organisers had already sent the submitted papers to the publisher.