Diamond, Peter Arthur, 1940–, American economist, b. New York City, Ph.D. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1963. Diamond was a professor at the Univ. of California, Berkeley, from 1963 to 1966, when he joined the faculty at his alma mater; he was named institute professor there in 1997. Diamond did pioneering work on how the real-world difficulties involved in bringing a buyer and seller together affect the costs of their transaction and tend to lead to an inefficient outcome. Along with Dale Mortensen and Christopher Pissarides, he developed so-called search and matching theory and the Diamond-Mortensen-Pissarides model, which is used for analyzing aspects of the labor market. For this work the three were awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2010. Diamond has also examined public debt, optimal taxation, and social security; he has served on U.S. government panels on social security and wrote, with Peter Orszag, Saving Social Security: A Balanced Approach (2005).
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