"My father was a chemist on the Yale faculty, my mother a housewife." — George Akerlof

When you give chief executives too much compensation in stock options, they concentrate too much on the stock price, and there is a perverse incentive to raise the stock price, particularly when the chief executive wants to exercise his own options.

Parents don't take a baby's temperature to decide whether the room is too warm; likewise, for global warming, we need a story that spurs us to do what is necessary.

The failure of credit markets is one of the major reasons for underdevelopment.

In the late 1960s, the New Classical economists saw the same weaknesses in the microfoundations of macroeconomics that have motivated me. They hated its lack of rigor. And they sacked it.

I've always been a macroeconomist. That's what I teach. And I guess that's what I've been concerned with ever since I've been very young.

The failure of credit markets is one of the major reasons for underdevelopment.

My Swedish grandmother was the daughter of a dairy farmer who lived near Hedemora. My Swedish grandfather worked as a clerk for the Swedish railways in the Stockholm station.

When men do all the outside work, they contribute on average about 10 percent of housework. But as their share of outside work falls, their share of housework rises to no more than 37 percent.

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My father was a chemist on the Yale faculty, my mother a housewife.