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Jerry R. Green  

David A. Wells Professor of Political Economy; John Leverett Professor in the University

Jerry Green is the John Leverett Professor in the University and the David A. Wells Professor of Political Economy in the Department of Economics.

His current research includes work on the economics of incentives, principles of equity for use in collective decision making and the use of data on choice to evaluate economic well-being.

Professor Green was one of the originators of the theory of rational expectations and of a variety of concepts and methods in the economics of incentives and information. He has pursued both the theory and applications of these ideas in his work. He was an early innovator in the analysis of the strategic uses of corporate financial management. He analyzed the growth consequences of corporate and capital gains taxation, the mortgage market, the risk characteristics of private pensions and the implications of patent policy for the pace of innovation.

Professor Green developed the required graduate course in economic theory at Harvard University, with which he has been involved with since 1970. He is a co-author, with Andreu Mas-Colell and Michael Whinston, of the leading graduate level textbook, Microeconomic Theory, (Oxford University Press, 1995, of Incentives in Public Decision Making (with Jean-Jacques Laffont, 1978), and over eighty scientific articles.

He is currently the chair of the Ph.D. Program in Business Economics at the Harvard Business School.

Professor Green joined the Harvard faculty in 1970, chaired the Economics Department from 1984 to 1987, and served as Provost of the University from 1992 to 1994. He is a Senior Fellow of Harvard's Society of Fellows and a Syndic of the Harvard University Press.

Professor Green is a Fellow of the Econometric Society and served on its Council from 1988 to 1994. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and has been an Erskine Fellow at the University of Canterbury, and a Guggenheim Fellow. He is an Oversees Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University. In 1980, he received the J.K.Galbraith Prize for excellence in teaching.

Professor Green chaired the National Science Foundation's Information Sciences Advisory Panel in 1980, prepared the Foundation's Ten-Year Outlook for the Social Sciences and served on the National Academy of Sciences Panel on Taxpayer Compliance. He has been an advisor to many universities and foundations.

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