Michael Spence

Academic Council Chairman

Nobel Laureate Michael Spence is a world authority on growth in developing countries and on the convergence between advanced and developing economies. He chairs the Academic Council which oversees the Institute’s research agenda and intellectual output to ensure they maintain an innovative edge and remain relevant in the global discourse.

Michael is a professor of economics at the Stern School of Business at New York University, Professor Emeritus of Management in the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University, a Senior Fellow of the Hoover Institution at Stanford and a Distinguished Visiting Fellow of the Council on Foreign Relations. He has also served as the Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard and the Dean of the Stanford Business School.

He serves on the boards of a number of private and public companies including Genpact, a global company for business processing and technology management, and MercadoLibre, a leading website in Latin America for e-commerce and online auctions. He is a member of the board of the Stanford Management Company and the International Chamber of Commerce Research Foundation. He is also a Senior Advisor to Oak Hill Investment Management, a US -based investment manager, and a consultant to PIMCO, a global investment management and solutions firm headquartered in California.

He is also a former Chairman of the Commission on Growth and Development, which focuses on emerging economies. In 2001, he received the Nobel Prize in Economics for work that assessed how markets try to close informational gaps.

Michael has published widely and is the author of several books and numerous articles and papers. His most recent publication is The Next Convergence: The Future of Economic Growth in a Multispeed World (May 2011).

He has a BA in Philosophy from Princeton University, a BA/MA in Mathematics from Oxford University and a PhD from Harvard University.

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