Christopher Pissarides was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2010, jointly with with Peter Diamond from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Dale Mortensen from Northwestern University.
The prize recognised their work on the economics of unemployment, especially job flows and the effects of being out of work. Announcing the new laureates, the Nobel Committee said the award was for analysis of markets with search frictions.
Professor Pissarides said: "Our research looks at what happens to someone who loses his or her job because of changes in economic environment. We have created a model which allows us to analyse the processes and decisions, such as policy, which affect how long it is before someone finds productive employment again. Until we began the work there was no way of thinking about these issues.
"One of the key things we found is that it is important to make sure that people do not stay unemployed too long so they don't lose their feel for the labour force. The ways of dealing with this need not be expensive training - it could be as simple as providing work experience."
Professor Pissarides is Professor of Economics at LSE and holder of the Norman Sosnow Chair in Economics. He is also a fellow of the Centre for Economic Performance at LSE and of the Centre for Economic Policy Research. He specialises in the economics of unemployment, labour-market theory, labour-market policy and more recently he has written about growth and structural change.
He has written extensively in professional journals and his book Equilibrium Unemployment Theory, now in its second edition, is a standard reference in the economics of unemployment. In 2009 he is serving as Vice President of the European Economic Association, to become President elect in 2010 and President in 2011.
Professor Pissarides was awarded his PhD at LSE in 1973 and has been on the faculty since. He is an elected fellow of the British Academy, the Econometric Society, the European Economic Association and the Society of Labor Economists.
He is also a member of Council of the European Economic Association and the Econometric Society and a former member of Council of the Royal Economic Society. In 2005 he was awarded the IZA Prize in Labor Economics (jointly with Dale Mortensen) for his work on unemployment and in 2008 he received the Republic of Cyprus "Aristeion" for the Arts, Literature and Science.