Biographical sketch of William D. Nordhaus

William Nordhaus is Sterling Professor of Economics at Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, USA. He was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico (which is part of the United States). He completed his undergraduate work at Yale University in 1963 and received his Ph.D. in Economics in 1967 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has been on the faculty of Yale University since 1967 and has been Full Professor of Economics since 1973. He is also Professor in Yale’s School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. Professor Nordhaus lives in downtown New Haven with his wife Barbara, who works at the Yale Child Study Center.

            Nordhaus is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is on the research staff of the National Bureau of Economic Research, the Cowles Foundation for Research, and has been a member and senior advisor of the Brookings Panel on Economic Activity, Washington, D.C. since 1972. Professor Nordhaus is current or past associate editor of several scientific journals. He was the first chair of the Advisory Committee for the Bureau of Economic Analysis and of the American Economic Association Committee on Federal Statistics. In 2004, he was awarded the prize of “Distinguished Fellow” by the American Economic Association. He was elected as President of the American Economic Association to serve in 2014-2015.

            From 1977 to 1979, he was a Member of the President's Council of Economic Advisers. From 1986 to 1988, he served as the Provost of Yale University. He is currently Deputy Chair of the Board of Directors of the Boston Federal Reserve Bank. He has served on several committees of the National Academy of Sciences on topics including climate change, environmental accounting, risk, and the role of the tax system in climate change.

He is the author of many books, among them Invention, Growth and Welfare, Is Growth Obsolete?, The Efficient Use of Energy Resources, Reforming Federal Regulation, Managing the Global Commons, Warming the World, and (joint with Paul Samuelson) the classic textbook, Economics, whose nineteenth edition was published in 2009. His most recent book on economic modeling of climate change, A Question of Balance (Yale University Press, 2008), was selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Title of 2008.

Professor Nordhaus has also studied wage and price behavior, health economics, augmented national accounting, the political business cycle, and productivity. His 1996 study of the economic history of lighting back to Babylonian times found that the measurement of long-term economic growth has been significantly underestimated. He returned to Mesopotamian economics with a study of the costs of the U.S. war in Iraq, published before the war began, projecting a total cost as high as $2 trillion. He is the author of the DICE and RICE models of the economics of climate change, which have been widely used in research on studies of climate-change economics and policies.