Industry, finance, computing, startups, the builders of the modern economy.
Alan Sugar's Amstrad brought out the CPC 464 in 1984, a low-cost home computer sold complete with its own monitor and tape deck, so families could start using it straight away.
Read the full story →In 1985 Alan Sugar's Amstrad launched the PCW 8256, a complete word processing system with screen, keyboard, printer and software for a fraction of the price of a business PC.
Read the full story →Alfred Mann, a physicist who had built solar power systems for spacecraft, founded companies that brought a rechargeable pacemaker, MiniMed insulin pumps, Advanced Bionics cochlear implants and the Argus II artificial retina to patients.
Read the full story →Economist Alvin Roth helped design the matching systems behind kidney exchange, which has allowed thousands of patients whose loved ones could not donate to them directly to receive a compatible kidney.
Read the full story →In 2012 Assaf Rappaport co-founded Adallom, an early tool that let organisations see and control how their data was used in cloud services, and which lives on as Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps.
Read the full story →Wiz, the company Assaf Rappaport co-founded in 2020, has uncovered serious security holes in major cloud platforms and reported them so they could be closed for every customer.
Read the full story →Ben Bernanke wrote The Courage to Act (2015) and coauthored Firefighting (2019) with Timothy Geithner and Henry Paulson to pass on lessons from the 2008 crisis.
Read the full story →Ben Bernanke coauthored two economics textbooks, edited the American Economic Review and is among the 50 most published economists in the world.
Read the full story →In a 1983 paper Ben Bernanke showed that the financial chaos of 1930–33 made credit scarce and costly, a mechanism later called the financial accelerator.
Read the full story →In 1951 Carl Djerassi, a refugee from Nazi Austria, co-invented norethisterone in Mexico City, the first highly active progestin that worked by mouth and a key ingredient of the Pill.
Read the full story →Digging through forgotten surveys, city directories and archives, Claudia Goldin built the first 200-year record of American women’s work and earnings and showed that today’s pay gap is driven mainly by parenthood and the structure of demanding jobs.
Read the full story →When a 1975 draft of prospect theory reached the young economist Richard Thaler, it explained his puzzles, such as the endowment effect, and helped launch behavioural economics.
Read the full story →In 1983 Douglas Diamond and Philip Dybvig showed why even healthy banks can collapse when depositors panic, and why a government guarantee of deposits prevents runs before they start, an idea at the heart of modern bank regulation.
Read the full story →Against the theory that shared resources are doomed to be overused, Elinor Ostrom gathered evidence from irrigation systems, pastures, forests and fisheries around the world showing that the people who use a resource can often manage it well themselves.
Read the full story →Emile Berliner, a Jewish immigrant from Hanover, patented the gramophone and flat disc record in 1887 and earlier invented an improved telephone transmitter, an early microphone.
Read the full story →In 1977 Eric Maskin discovered the condition, now called Maskin monotonicity, that tells whether a society’s goal can be built into rules so that self-interested people always end up achieving it, founding the implementation theory used in auction, regulation and voting design.
Read the full story →Franco Modigliani taught at MIT for about 40 years. Paul Samuelson called him a great teacher whose students included Nobel laureate Robert Merton.
Read the full story →In 1958 Franco Modigliani and Merton Miller showed that, under certain assumptions, a firm’s value does not depend on whether it is financed by debt or by shares.
Read the full story →In his 1964 book Human Capital, Gary Becker built the economic theory of schooling, training and health as investments that raise earnings, giving governments a way to measure the value of education.
Read the full story →George Akerlof’s 1970 paper “The Market for ‘Lemons’”, rejected by several journals as trivial, showed that when sellers know more than buyers a market can collapse, explaining why warranties, brands and insurance rules exist.
Read the full story →Harry Markowitz’s 1959 book Portfolio Selection: Efficient Diversification of Investments, written at Yale’s Cowles Foundation, set out his theory in full.
Read the full story →In his 1952 paper “Portfolio Selection”, Harry Markowitz showed mathematically how investors can reduce risk through diversification, founding modern portfolio theory.
Read the full story →Held by the British in New York, Haym Salomon used his position to help American and French prisoners escape, and later quietly supported members of Congress, including James Madison, from his own pocket.
Read the full story →As the main broker for America's first finance office, Haym Salomon turned French and Dutch aid into cash the struggling Continental government could spend.
Read the full story →In 1914 Irving Berlin became a charter member of ASCAP, the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers, which has protected songwriters' royalties ever since.
Read the full story →Economic historian Joel Mokyr showed that sustained growth began only when practical know-how and scientific explanation started feeding each other, in societies open enough to let new technology replace the old.
Read the full story →In 1967–68 John Harsanyi, a survivor of Nazi forced labour, created the method of “Bayesian games” for strategic situations in which players hold private information, the foundation of modern auction, contract and information economics.
Read the full story →Joshua Angrist showed how draft lotteries, birth dates, class-size caps and school admission lotteries can act as natural experiments, giving governments reliable evidence on which schools and programmes actually help people.
Read the full story →Sears president Julius Rosenwald partnered with Booker T. Washington to build about 5,000 Rosenwald Schools for Black children in the segregated South, educating some 600,000 students.
Read the full story →In 1916 Julius Rosenwald and Albert Loeb launched one of the first comprehensive profit-sharing plans at Sears, open to every employee; 90% of workers joined.
Read the full story →Larry Page's long-held dream of searching every book led to Google Books, which has made more than 40 million books discoverable and lets anyone read public domain works free online.
Read the full story →As a Stanford graduate student, Larry Page co-created PageRank, a way of ranking web pages by the links pointing to them, which became the basis of free Google search used by people everywhere.
Read the full story →From the 1940s Lawrence Klein built statistical models of national economies, correctly forecasting the postwar boom and creating the Wharton models and Project LINK, the ancestors of the forecasting models central banks and governments use today.
Read the full story →Leonid Hurwicz, a twice-displaced Jewish refugee who never earned an economics degree, created mechanism design and the idea of incentive compatibility, the basis for designing auctions, regulations and other institutions that work even when people act in their own interest.
Read the full story →In 1958 and 1961 Merton Miller and Franco Modigliani showed that, in an idealised market, a company’s value depends on its investments rather than on how it borrows or pays dividends, a benchmark that transformed how firms are valued and financed.
Read the full story →Michael Kremer’s idea of an advance market commitment, a binding promise to buy a vaccine once it is developed, was used to bring pneumococcal vaccines to the world’s poorest countries, protecting about 109 million children within a decade.
Read the full story →A randomized study in Kenyan schools, designed by Michael Kremer and Edward Miguel, found that cheap deworming pills cut school absence by a quarter, and the Deworm the World Initiative he co-founded has since supported more than 1.8 billion treatments for children.
Read the full story →Using his theory of incomplete contracts, Oliver Hart and two Harvard colleagues showed in 1997 that private operators of public services such as prisons can have too strong an incentive to cut costs at the expense of quality, giving governments a clear way to decide what to contract out.
Read the full story →Paul Milgrom led the design of the FCC’s broadcast incentive auction, the world’s first two-sided spectrum auction, which in 2017 bought airwaves from TV stations and resold them for mobile broadband, raising about 19.8 billion dollars.
Read the full story →With Robert Wilson, Paul Milgrom invented the simultaneous multiple round auction first used by the U.S. FCC in 1994; adopted by many countries, it has raised more than 200 billion dollars from spectrum sales and put airwaves to use for mobile phones and data.
Read the full story →For more than four decades MIT economist Peter Diamond has applied economic theory to public pensions, advising the U.S. Congress on Social Security and helping countries from China to Chile design retirement systems that protect older people.
Read the full story →With Peter Howitt, Philippe Aghion built the first general-equilibrium model of growth through creative destruction, and used it to show why competition, research support and protection for displaced workers all matter for prosperity.
Read the full story →In 1965 Reinhard Selten, who had been persecuted as a half-Jewish boy under the Nazis, introduced subgame perfection, a way to rule out empty threats in strategic models that is now basic to competition policy, bargaining and the analysis of economic policy.
Read the full story →Richard Thaler and Shlomo Benartzi designed Save More Tomorrow, which lets workers commit future pay rises to their pensions, and together with automatic enrolment it has become a standard way to help people save for old age.
Read the full story →By linking the records of nearly 40,000 Union Army soldiers and centuries of data on height and diet, Robert Fogel showed how escaping chronic malnutrition drove the modern rise in health and life expectancy.
Read the full story →In 1956 Robert Solow published a simple model showing that adding machines and workers alone cannot keep an economy growing; lasting growth needs technical progress.
Read the full story →In 1957 Robert Solow used US data to show that roughly four-fifths of growth in output per worker came from technical progress, not just more capital.
Read the full story →In his 1981 paper “Optimal Auction Design,” Roger Myerson showed how a seller can design an auction when every bidder keeps their true value secret, and his recipe for reserve prices is now used to run online advertising auctions.
Read the full story →Sergey Brin, a Jewish refugee from Moscow, co-created PageRank at Stanford and co-founded Google, making the world's information searchable in seconds.
Read the full story →In 1955 Simon Kuznets proposed that as countries develop, income inequality first rises and then falls, an idea known as the Kuznets curve.
Read the full story →Studying US data back to 1865, Simon Kuznets identified economic cycles lasting 15 to 25 years, now known as Kuznets cycles or long swings.
Read the full story →In 1934 Simon Kuznets delivered the first official estimate of US national income, laying the groundwork for the measure we now call GDP.
Read the full story →Simon Kuznets compiled 60 years of data for 14 countries to explain modern economic growth, helping to found the field of development economics.
Read the full story →In 1942 Simon Kuznets used long-run data to show that the US savings rate stayed roughly constant from the 1870s to the 1940s, overturning a prediction drawn from Keynes.
Read the full story →Simon Kuznets helped standardise the measurement of national output, but cautioned that a nation's welfare can scarcely be inferred from a measure of national income.
Read the full story →The Cohen–Boyer recombinant DNA patents were licensed non-exclusively, for moderate fees, to 478 companies, spreading gene cloning across the biotechnology industry.
Read the full story →Starting in the 1930s, Wassily Leontief built tables showing how every industry buys from every other, a method now used by statistical offices worldwide to trace jobs, prices, supply chains and pollution through the economy.
Read the full story →William Nordhaus created the first integrated models of climate and the economy, which let governments put a price on the damage done by each ton of carbon dioxide, the “social cost of carbon” now used in climate policy.
Read the full story →“A friend is devoted at all times; a brother is born to share adversity.”