Part-time Professor
Florence School of Transnational Governance
Contact info
[email protected]
Administrative contact
Adrien Bradley
Working languages
Swedish, Finnish, English
Bengt Robert Holmström is the Paul A. Samuelson Professor of Economics, Emeritus, at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He joined MIT’s economics department in 1994 with a joint appointment at MIT’s Sloan School of Management. He was head of the Economics Department from 2003-2006. Holmström received his doctoral degree from Stanford University in 1978. Before joining MIT 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).In 2016, Holmström was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize (jointly with Oliver Hart) for his research on contract theory. Together with Hart, he laid the foundations of a field that has come to influence almost all areas of economics. His models of incentives and contracting, especially as applied to the theory of the firm, to corporate governance and to liquidity problems in financial markets, are notable for their theoretical elegance and practical insights. His recent research on the financial crisis 2008-09 has strongly influenced current views of the causes of the crises and more generally, the role of debt in the financial system.Holmström is a former board member of the Nokia Corporation (1999-2012), the Finnish Business and Policy Forum EVA (2005-2018), and Aalto University (2010-2017). He currently serves on several academic advisory boards, including Barcelona Graduate School of Economics, Toulouse School of Economics and the Luohan Academy in China.