Dale T. Mortensen is the Board of Trustees Professor and Professor of Economics at Northwestern University, a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), and a research fellow of the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA). Professor Mortensen received his B.A. in Economics from Willamette University in 1961 and his Ph.D. in Economics from Carnegie-Mellon University in 1967. Mortensen is a fellow of Econometrica Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Society of Labor Economics, and the European Economic Association. He was awarded the IZA Labor Economics Prize in 2005 and the Society of Labor Economics Mincer Prize in 2007. In 2008 he was elected an American Economic Association Distinguished Fellow. He was awarded the 2010 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences together with Christopher Pissarides and Peter Diamond for their contributions to the analysis to "Markets with Search Friction."

Mortensen pioneered the theory of job search and search unemployment and extended it to study labor turnover, research and development, personal relationships, and labor reallocation. The model he helped develop has become the leading technique for the analysis of labor market fluctuations and the effects of labor market policy. The development of equilibrium dynamic models designed to account for wage dispersion, the time series behavior of job and worker flows, and the role of reallocation in the determination of aggregate growth and productivity found in Danish micro data are the principal topics of his current research. His publications include over fifty scientific articles. His book, Wage Dispersion: Why Are Similar Workers Paid Differently?, was published by MIT Press in 2003. A new book, jointly authored with with Pissarides, entitled Job Matching, Unemployment, and Wage Dispersion was published by Oxford University Press in 2011.