A. Michael Spence

A. Michael Spence is an American economist who has won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.

A. Michael Spence is an economics professor at New York University Leonard N. Stern School of Business, where he has served as a professor since 2010. Spence has also served as the Philip H. Knight Professor Emeritus of Management in the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University.

In addition, he is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, a Stanford-based free-market think tank. His work at the Hoover Institution earned Spence the John Bates Clark Medal of the American Economic Association, which was awarded to an American economist under 40 years of age who was deemed to have made the most important and valuable contributions to the areas of economic knowledge and insight.

Spence has earned an assortment of other prestigious awards, including the John Kenneth Galbraith Prize for excellence in teaching and the David A. Wells Prize for the outstanding doctoral dissertation at Harvard.

While at Stanford, Spence also served as dean of the Business School. In that role, he had a range of critical responsibilities, including overseeing key financial and educational policies. He had previously taught an associate economics professor at Stanford. Prior to teaching at Stanford, Spence taught economics and business administration at Harvard. While at Harvard, Spence was named chairman of the Economics department, later holding the position of the dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

Spence earned a Nobel Prize, officially titled The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel in 2001, for his analysis of information asymmetry. His work specifically focused on how individuals can use their education credentials as a signal to potential employers. He was awarded the Nobel Prize jointly with George Akerlof and Joseph Stiglitz, professors at University of California at Berkeley and Columbia University, respectively.

Born in 1943 in New Jersey, Spence grew up in Canada. His research subjects include emerging markets, information economics, dynamic competition and leadership's effect on economic growth. He has also served as a director on the boards of numerous public and private companies, including General Mills. Spence has also served on the editorial boards of several economics and financial publications, including the Journal of Economic Theory and American Economics Review, and also serves on the boards of several economics councils including the National Research Council Board on Science, Technology and Economic Policy.