Edmund Phelps

Edmund Phelps, 92, died on May 15, 2026. Edmund Phelps was known publicly as an American economist and Nobel Prize laureate (2006). Edmund Strother Phelps (July 26, 1933 – May 15, 2026) was an American economist and the recipient of the 2006 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. Early in his career, he became known for his research at Yale's Cowles Foundation in the first half of the 1960s on the sources of economic growth. His demonstration of the golden rule savings rate, a concept related to work by John von Neumann, started a wave of research on how much a nation should spend on present consumption rather than save and invest for future generations. Phelps was at the University of Pennsylvania from 1966 to 1971 and moved to Columbia University in 1971. His most seminal work inserted a microfoundation, one featuring imperfect information, incomplete knowledge and expectations about wages and prices, to support a macroeconomic theory of employment determination and price-wage dynamics. This public record remains centered on Phelps's work as an American economist and Nobel Prize laureate (2006) and the documented milestones of that career.