University of Chicago GSB

Gary Becker

Gary Becker is the University Professor in the Departments of Economics and of Sociology, and at Chicago Booth, where he has pioneered study in the fields of human capital, economics of the family, and economic analysis of crime, discrimination, addiction, and population.

On November 5, 2007 Professor Becker was awarded the 2007 Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian award.

In December 2000 he was awarded the National Medal of Science.

In 1992, he was awarded the Alfred Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences "for having extended the domain of microeconomic analysis to a wide range of human behavior and interaction, including non-market behavior."

Professor Becker received an A.B. in Economics and Mathematics from Princeton University in 1951 and his Ph.D. in Economics from Chicago in 1955. He was an Assistant Professor in Economics at Chicago from 1954 to 1957 and taught at Columbia University from 1957 to 1969, when he returned to Chicago.

He is also the Rose-Marie and Jack R. Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, a Research Associate of the Economics Research Center at the National Opinion Research Center, and is the recipient of numerous honorary degrees.

Professor Becker is a founding member of the National Academy of Education and a fellow in the American Statistical Association, the Econometric Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society and the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population. He is also a member of the American Economic Association, of which he was president in 1987.

In 1967, Professor Becker was awarded the John Bates Clark Medal which is given once every two years to the most outstanding American economist under the age of forty.  He also received the Seidman Award and the first social science Award of Merit from the National Institute of Health.

Professor Becker along with Judge Richard Posner of the U.S. Seventh Court of Appeals writes the Becker-Posner blog.  

Visit Gary Becker's home page