Professor Oliver Hart was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2016 jointly with Bengt Holmström of MIT for their contributions to contract theory.
Their work was described by the prize awarding body as laying “an intellectual foundation for designing policies and institutions in many areas, from bankruptcy legislation to political constitutions”. Professor Oliver Hart is Visiting Centennial Professor in the LSE Economics Department.
Professor Hart studied at Cambridge and Warwick Universities before completing a PhD at Princeton University. He was appointed Andrew E Furer Professor of Economics at Harvard University in 1997.
He was a professor at LSE 1982-1985, has been the BP Visiting Chair in the Economics Department since 1991, and in 2007 gave the inaugural Coase Lecture, in honour of another Nobel Prize winner, Ronald Coase.