SOLOW, ROBERT MERTON

SOLOW, ROBERT MERTON (1924– ), U.S. economist, Nobel Prize laureate. Born in Brooklyn, Solow was educated at Harvard University from which he received his Ph.D. in 1951. From 1949 he was on the faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, becoming a professor of economics in 1958 and Institute Professor in 1973. He was also affiliated with the Council of Economic Advisers, as senior economist (1961–62) and consultant (1962–68), and was a consultant to the RAND corporation (1952–64). He served as a director of the Boston Federal Reserve   Bank from 1975 to 1980 and was chairman of the bank in 1979–80. Among Solow's other activities, he was a member of the President's Commission on Income Maintenance (1968–70), served on the board of directors and as a member of the executive committee of the National Bureau of Economic Research, served as a trustee of the Institute for Advanced Studies of Princeton University (1972–78), and was president of the American Economic Association (1979). In 1961 he received the AEA's John Bates Clark Award, given to the best economist under age 40. A fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the recipient of the Seidman award in Political Economics (1983), he was awarded the Nobel Prize in economic sciences in 1987 for his significant contributions to the theory of economic growth. In 1995 he retired from teaching at MIT. He served as chairman of the board of the nonprofit research group Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation, which he helped establish in the 1970s. He was also Foundation Fellow of the Russell Sage Foundation. Solow authored a number of works, which include The Source of Unemployment in the United States (1964), Growth Theory (1970), The Behavior of the Price Level (1970), Made in America (with M. Dertouzos and R. Lester, 1989), Learning from "Learning and Doing" (1997), Work and Welfare (1998), An Almost Practical Step toward Sustainability (1998), Monopolistic Competition and Macroeconomic Theory (1999), and Structural Reform and Economic Policy (2005). -BIBLIOGRAPHY: P. Diamond, Growth/Productivity/Unemployment (1990). (Ruth Beloff (2nd ed.)