Sir James Alexander Mirrlees (5 July 1936 – 29 August 2018) was a British economist and winner of the 1996 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. He was

knighted A knight is a person granted an honorary title of knighthood by a head of state (including the Pope) or representative for service to the monarch, the church or the country, especially in a military capacity. Knighthood finds origins in the Gr ...

in the

1997 Birthday Honours The 1997 Birthday Honours were announced on 14 June 1997 for the United Kingdom and on 2 June 1997 for New Zealand.New Zealand list: Queen's Birthday Honours are announced on or around the date of the Queen's Official Birthday in the United Kingd ...

Early life and education

Born in

Minnigaff Minnigaff is a village and Civil parishes in Scotland, civil parish in the historic county of Kirkcudbrightshire in Dumfries and Galloway, Scotland. Lead was discovered there in 1763 and mined about two miles from the village until 1839. Etym ...

Kirkcudbrightshire Kirkcudbrightshire ( ), or the County of Kirkcudbright or the Stewartry of Kirkcudbright is one of the historic counties of Scotland, covering an area in the south-west of the country. Until 1975, Kirkcudbrightshire was an administrative count ...

, Mirrlees was educated at

Douglas Ewart High School Douglas Ewart High School was opened in 1922 in Newton Stewart, Scotland. It was formed by the amalgamation of the Douglas Free School opened in 1834 and the High School of the Ewart Institute opened in 1864. The headteacher has been George Web ...

, then at the University of Edinburgh ( MA in Mathematics and Natural Philosophy in 1957) and

Trinity College, Cambridge Trinity College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge. Founded in 1546 by King Henry VIII, Trinity is one of the largest Cambridge colleges, with the largest financial endowment of any college at either Cambridge or Oxford. ...

(

Mathematical Tripos The Mathematical Tripos is the mathematics course that is taught in the Faculty of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge. It is the oldest Tripos examined at the University. Origin In its classical nineteenth-century form, the tripos was ...

and PhD in 1963 with thesis title ''Optimum Planning for a Dynamic Economy'', supervised by

Richard Stone Sir John Richard Nicholas Stone (30 August 1913 – 6 December 1991) was an eminent British economist, educated at Westminster School and Gonville and Caius College and King's College at the University of Cambridge. In 1984, he was awarded th ...

). He was a very active student debater. A contemporary, Quentin Skinner, has suggested that Mirrlees was a member of the

Cambridge Apostles The Cambridge Apostles (also known as '' Conversazione Society'') is an intellectual society at the University of Cambridge founded in 1820 by George Tomlinson, a Cambridge student who became the first Bishop of Gibraltar.W. C. Lubenow, ''The C ...

along with fellow Nobel Laureate

Amartya Sen Amartya Kumar Sen (; born 3 November 1933) is an Indian economist and philosopher, who since 1972 has taught and worked in the United Kingdom and the United States. Sen has made contributions to welfare economics, social choice theory, economi ...

during the period.

Economics

Between 1968 and 1976, Mirrlees was a visiting professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology three times. He was also a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley (1986) and Yale University (1989). He taught at both Oxford University (as Edgeworth Professor of Economics 1968–1995) and University of Cambridge (1963–1968 and 1995–2018). During his time at Oxford, he published papers on economic models for which he would eventually be awarded his Nobel Prize. The papers centred on

asymmetric information In contract theory and economics, information asymmetry deals with the study of decisions in transactions where one party has more or better information than the other. Information asymmetry creates an imbalance of power in transactions, which c ...

, which determines the extent to which they should affect the optimal rate of saving in an economy. Among other results, he demonstrated the principles of "

moral hazard In economics, a moral hazard is a situation where an economic actor has an incentive to increase its exposure to risk because it does not bear the full costs of that risk. For example, when a corporation is insured, it may take on higher ri ...

" and " optimal income taxation" discussed in the books of William Vickrey. The methodology has since become the standard in the field. Mirrlees and Vickrey shared the 1996 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences "for their fundamental contributions to the economic theory of incentives under asymmetric information". Mirrlees was also co-creator, with MIT Professor

Peter A. Diamond Peter Arthur Diamond (born , 1940) is an American economist known for his analysis of U.S. Social Security policy and his work as an advisor to the Advisory Council on Social Security in the late 1980s and 1990s. He was awarded the Nobel Memoria ...

, of the Diamond–Mirrlees efficiency theorem, which was developed in 1971. Mirrlees was emeritus Professor of Political Economy at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of

. He spent several months a year at the University of Melbourne, Australia. He was the Distinguished Professor-at-Large of the

Chinese University of Hong Kong The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) is a public research university in Ma Liu Shui, Hong Kong, formally established in 1963 by a charter granted by the Legislative Council of Hong Kong. It is the territory's second-oldest university and ...

as well as University of Macau. In 2009, he was appointed Founding Master of the Morningside College of the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Mirrlees was a member of Scotland's

Council of Economic Advisers The Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) is a United States agency within the Executive Office of the President established in 1946, which advises the President of the United States on economic policy. The CEA provides much of the empirical resea ...

. He also led the Mirrlees Review, a review of the UK tax system by the

Institute for Fiscal Studies The Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) is an economic research institute based in London, United Kingdom, which specialises in UK taxation and public policy. It produces both academic and policy-related findings. The institute's aim is to "ad ...

. His Ph.D. students included eminent academics and policy makers like professor

Franklin Allen Franklin Allen, (born 6 March 1956) is a British economist and academic. Since 2014, he has been professor of finance and economics, and executive director of the Brevan Howard Centre at Imperial College London. He was the Nippon Life Prof ...

, Sir Partha Dasgupta, professor

Huw Dixon Huw David Dixon (/hju: devəd dɪksən/), born 1958, is a British economist. He has been a professor at Cardiff Business School since 2006, having previously been Head of Economics at the University of York (2003–2006) after being a professo ...

, professor

Hyun-Song Shin Hyun Song Shin () is a South Korean economic theorist and financial economist who focuses on global games. He has been the Economic Adviser and Head of Research of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) since May 1, 2014. Previously, he w ...

, Lord Nicholas Stern, professor

Anthony Venables Anthony James Venables, CBE, (born 25 April 1953), is a British economist and the BP Professor of Economics at the Department of Economics, University of Oxford. Venables is known as one of the pioneers of New economic geography. He co-autho ...

Sir John Vickers Sir John Vickers (born 7 July 1958) is a British economist and the Warden of All Souls College, Oxford. Education Vickers studied at Eastbourne Grammar School and Oriel College, Oxford. He graduated with a DPhil from the University of Oxford. ...

, and professor

Zhang Weiying Zhang Weiying (; born October 1, 1959) is a Chinese economist and was head of the Guanghua School of Management, Peking University. He is known for his advocacy of free markets and his ideas have been influenced by the Austrian School. Biograph ...

. He died in Cambridge, England, on 29 August 2018.

Personal life

Mirrlees was an atheist.

Publications

* "A New Model of Economic Growth"(with N. Kaldor), ''RES'', 1962 * "Optimum Growth When Technology is Changing", ''RES'', 1967 * "The Dynamic Nonsubstitution Theorem", ''RES'', 1969 * "The Evaluation of National Income in an Imperfect Economy", ''Pakistan Development Review'', 1969 * ''Manual of Industrial Project Analysis in Developing Countries, Vol II: Social Cost Benefit Analysis'' (with I.M.D. Little), 1969 * "An Exploration in the Theory of Optimum Income Taxation", ''RES'', 197

* "Optimal Taxation and Public Production I: Production Efficiency" (with P.A. Diamond), ''AER'', 1971 * "Optimal Taxation and Public Production II: Tax Rules"(with P.A. Diamond),''AER'', 1971 * "The Terms of Trade: Pearson on Trade, Debt, and Liquidity", in ''The Widening Gap'' (ed. Barbara Ward), 1971) * "On Producer Taxation", ''RES'', 1972 * "Further Reflections on Project Analysis" (with I.M.D. Little), ''Development and Planning. Essays for Paul Rosenstein-Rodan'' (eds. Bhagwati and Eckaus, 1972 * "Fairly Good Plans" (with N.H. Stern), ''Journal of Economic Theory'', 1972 * "Aggregate Production with Consumption Externalities" (with P.A. Diamond), ''QJE'', 1973 * "The Optimum Town", ''Swedish Journal of Economics'', 1972 * "Population Policy and the Taxation of Family Size", ''Journal of Public Economics'', 1972 *"Agreeable Plans" (with P.J. Hammond) and "Models of Economic Growth" (introduction), in ''Models of Economic Growth'' (ed. Mirrlees and Stern), 1973 * ''Project Appraisal and Planning for Developing Countries'' (with I.M.D. Little), 1974 * "Optimal Accumulation under Uncertainty: the Case of Stationary Returns to Investment", in ''Allocation under Uncertainty'' (ed. J. Dreze), 1974 * "Notes on Welfare Economics, Information and Uncertainty", in ''Essays in Equilibrium Behavior under Uncertainty'' (eds. M. Balch, D. McFadden, and S. Wu), 1974 * "Optimal Taxation in a Two-Class Economy", ''Journal of Public Economics'', 1975 * "Optimum Saving with Economies of Scale" (with A.K. Dixit and N.H. Stern), ''RES'', 1975 * "A Pure Theory of Underdeveloped Economies, using a Relationship between Consumption and Productivity", in ''Agriculture in Development Theory'' (ed. L. Reynolds), 1975 * "The Desirability of Natural Resource Depletion" (with J.A. Kay), in ''The Economics of Natural Resource Depletion'' (ed. D.W. Pearce), 1975 * "The Optimal Structure of Incentives and Authority within an Organization", ''Bell Journal of Economics and Management Science'', 1976 * "On the Assignment of Liability: the Uniform Case" (with P.A. Diamond), ''Bell Journal of Economics'', 1975 * "Private Constant Returns and Public Shadow Prices"(with P.A. Diamond), ''RES'', 1976 * "Optimal Tax Theory: A Synthesis", ''Journal of Public Economics'', December 1976 * "Implications for Tax Rates", in ''Taxation and Incentives'', 1976 * "Arguments for Public Expenditure" in ''Contemporary Economic Analysis'' (eds. Artis and Nobay), 1979 * "Social Benefit-Cost Analysis and the Distribution of Income", ''World Development'', 1978 * "A Model of Optimal Social Insurance with Variable Retirement" (with P.A. Diamond), ''Journal of Public Economics'', 1978 * "Optimal Taxation in a Stochastic Economy: A Cobb-Douglas Example" (with P.A. Diamond and J. Helms), ''Journal of Public Economics'', 1980 * "Optimal Foreign-income taxation", ''Journal of Public Economics'', 1982 * "The economic uses of utilitarianism", in * "The Theory of Optimum Taxation", ''Handbook of Mathematical Economics'' (eds. Arrow and Intriligator), Vol.III, 1985 * "Insurance Aspects of Pensions" (with P.A. Diamond), in ''Pensions, Labor and Individual Choice'' (ed. David A. Wise), 1985 * "Payroll-tax financed social insurance with variable retirement" (with P. A. Diamond), ''Scandinavian Journal of Economics'', 1986 * "Taxing Uncertain Incomes", ''Oxford Economic Papers'', 1990 * "Project Appraisal and Planning Twenty Years On" (with I.M.D. Little), in ''Proceedings of the World Bank Annual Conference on Development Economics 1990'' (eds. Stanley Fischer, Dennis de Tray and Shekhar Shah), 1991 * "Optimal Taxation of Identical Consumers when markets are incomplete" (with P.A. Diamond), in ''Economic Analysis of Markets and Games'' (ed. Dasgupta, Gale, Hart and Maskin), 1992 * "Optimal Taxation and Government Finance" in ''Modern Public Finance'' (eds. Quigley and Smolensky), 1994 * "Welfare Economics and Economies of Scale", ''Japanese Economic Review'', 1995 * "Private Risk and Public Action: The Economies of the Welfare State", ''European Economic Review'', 1995
"Tax by Design: the Mirrlees Review"
J. Mirrlees, S. Adam, T. Besley, R. Blundell, S. Bond, R. Chote, M. Gammie, P. Johnson, G. Myles and J. Poterba, , Oxford University Press: September 2011.

References

External links

*
James Mirrlees website
Pete Tregear and Dan Atherton.

from The Chinese University of Hong Kong
James Mirrlees interviewed by Alan Macfarlane 21 July 2009 (video)
* * * including the Prize Lecture 9 December 1996 ''Information and Incentives: The Economics of Carrots and Sticks'' {{DEFAULTSORT:Mirrlees, James 1936 births 2018 deaths Alumni of the University of Edinburgh Alumni of Trinity College, Cambridge Chinese University of Hong Kong Edgeworth Professors of Economics Fellows of Nuffield College, Oxford Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge Fellows of the British Academy Fellows of the Econometric Society Presidents of the Econometric Society Fellows of the Royal Society of Edinburgh Foreign associates of the National Academy of Sciences Information economists Knights Bachelor Massachusetts Institute of Technology faculty Nobel laureates in Economics Public economists People educated at Douglas Ewart High School People from Dumfries and Galloway Scottish atheists Scottish economists Scottish Nobel laureates 20th-century British economists 20th-century Scottish writers 21st-century British economists 21st-century Scottish writers Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences Institute for New Economic Thinking Professors of Political Economy (Cambridge, 1863)