Feature

The Class of 2006?

Columbia’s buying spree is not over. To break into the top five, the university needs a few up-and-coming macroeconomists and perhaps another big name. Fortunately, the newly prestigious department has plenty of options.

Published Oct 2, 2005

(Photo: Photographs courtesy of the subjects)

The Heavy Hitters
John Geanakoplos
Yale’s Geanakoplos is a former junior national chess champion and currently an authority on the relationship between interest rates and inflation. He’s turned down Columbia before but has let it be known that he might be available. The fact that his wife is a professor at Barnard College makes a deal even more desirable.

Dirk Bergemann
Another Yalie, Bergemann is a top theorist of mechanism design—how to structure auctions that get maximum returns, for example. Bergemann turned down an offer from Columbia two years ago. But Bergemann’s spouse works in New York, and Columbia is mulling another attempt at poaching him.

The Most Promising Macros
George-Marios Angeletos
A student of Robert Barro, the Harvard star Columbia tried to lure away in 1998, Angeletos currently teaches at MIT—which, unfortunately, is probably the most successful department in the country at retaining top young talent.

Ivan Werning
A colleague of Angeletos’s at MIT, Werning earned his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago and has collaborated with such Chicago heavyweights as Nobel laureate Gary Becker and Pierre-André Chiappori, whom Columbia hired this spring.

Monika Piazzesi
Piazzesi recently received tenure at the University of Chicago business school, where she has taught since 2003. Remarkably, Piazzesi already has three publications in the field’s most prestigious journal, the American Economic Review.

See also:
Freakonomizing
To cash in on the hottest academic trend, Columbia bought in bulk.
Who They Hired
Columbia added seven renowned scholars to its economics department in just one year.
A Closer Look at Sunspot Theory
How it could rewrite the rules of recruiting.