Bengt Holmström

Microeconomic theorist

Bengt Robert Holmström is the Paul A. Samuelson Professor of Economics, emeritus at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he was head of the Economics Department from 2003-2006.

Until his retirement, he held a joint appointment with MIT’s Sloan School of Management. Bengt Holmström received his doctoral degree from Stanford University in 1978. Before joining MIT in 1994, he was the Edwin J. Beinecke Professor of Management at Yale University’s School of Management (1983-94) and associate professor at the Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University (1979-82).

Bengt Holmström is a microeconomic theorist, best known for his research on the theory of contracting and incentives especially as applied to the theory of the firm, to corporate governance and to liquidity problems in financial crises. In 2011 he co-authored the book Inside and Outside Liquidity with Jean Tirole.

In 2011 he was President of the Econometric Society. He has received numerous academic honors including the 2016 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel for his contributions to contract theory (together with Oliver Hart).

He is a former board member of the Nokia Corporation (1999-2012) and Aalto University (2010-2017) and serves on several academic advisory boards, including Toulouse School of Economics, Luohan Academy, Hangzou and the Stanford Graduate School of Business.