Dear Colleagues,

you may be aware that Gary Becker has passed away on March 3.

Becker was an leading figure in the expansion of economics' boundaries from the 1950s onwards, and the application of neoclassical economics to non-market behavior, notably through his work on human capital, discrimination, family and population, and addiction. His work was both influential and controversial, being one of the most cited economists of the last decades of the twentieth century.
He did his BA at Princeton (1951) (with Jacob Viner apparently having said that he was the most brilliant student he had ever had - a statement that apparently did not go down well with several of the luminaries that has been taught by Viner...) and his PHD at Chicago (1955), where he would start his career (with his mentors being Milton Friedman, H. Gregg Lewis and T. W. Schultz).
During most of the 1960s he was at Columbia University and at the NBER (then in NYC), developing important work in collaboration with Jacob Mincer and with several young economists that played a crucial role in the development of neoclassical labour economics. With the turmoil of the late 1960s, he would return to UChicago, where he would spend the rest of his long and prolific career.
He was awarded the John Bates Clark Medal in 1967 and the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics in 1992.
In recent decades he became more of a public intellectual with some regular collaborations with the media and in blogs and his work became increasingly noted in other social sciences, not the least due to the influence of rational choice theory.

For the announcement by the University of Chicago, please see the following link:

 http://news.uchicago.edu/article/2014/05/04/gary-s-becker-nobel-winning-scholar-economics-and-sociology-1930-2014?utm_source=newsmodule

Kind regards,

Pedro Teixeira

Pedro Nuno Teixeira
Director - CIPES, Centre for Research in Higher Education Policies - www.cipes.up.pt
Associate Professor - Faculty of Economics, University of Porto - www.fep.up.pt