Joel Mokyr

Joel Mokyr is the Robert H. Strotz Professor of Arts and Sciences and Professor of Economics and History at Northwestern University, as well as Sackler Professor at the Eitan Berglas School of Economics at Tel Aviv University. He is an American-Israeli economic historian, he specializes in economic history and the economics of technological and population change.

Mokyr is the author of numerous influential works, including Why Ireland Starved, The Lever of Riches, The British Industrial Revolution: An Economic Perspective, The Gifts of Athena, The Enlightened Economy, and A Culture of Growth (Princeton University Press, 2016). He has published more than 100 articles and books in his field.

He has served as senior editor of the Journal of Economic History and editor-in-chief of both the Oxford Encyclopedia of Economic History and the Princeton University Press series Economic History of the Western World. He has also led several professional associations, including the Economic History Association, the Midwest Economics Association, and the Atlantic Economic Association. Mokyr is a director of the National Bureau of Economic Research and chairs the advisory committee for the Institutions, Organizations, and Growth program of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research.

Mokyr earned his undergraduate degree from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and his Ph.D. from Yale University. He has taught at Northwestern since 1974 and held visiting appointments at Harvard, Stanford, the University of Chicago, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Tel Aviv University, University College Dublin, and the University of Manchester.

Among his many honors, Mokyr received the Heineken Prize for History from the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences and the Balzan Prize for Economic History. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Econometric Society, and the Cliometric Society; a foreign fellow of the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences and the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei; and a corresponding fellow of the British Academy. His books have received numerous awards, including the Joseph Schumpeter Memorial Prize, the Ranki Prize, the Donald Price Prize, and the Allan Sharlin Prize. In 2018 he received an honorary doctorate from the National University of Uruguay and was elected a Distinguished Fellow of the American Economic Association. In 2019 he was awarded the Jonathan Hughes Prize for excellence in teaching economic history.