In 2001, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics for his analyses of markets with asymmetric information, and he was a lead author of the 1995 Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. In 2011, TIME named Stiglitz one of the 100 most influential people in the world. He is now serving as president of the International Economic Association.
Stiglitz was a member of the Council of Economic Advisers from 1993-95, during the Clinton administration, and served as CEA chairman from 1995-97. He then became chief economist and senior vice president of the World Bank from 1997-2000. In 2008, he was asked by the French President Nicolas Sarkozy to chair the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress. He now chairs a high level expert group at the OECD attempting to advance further these ideas. In 2009, he was appointed by the President of the United Nations General Assembly as chair of the Commission of Experts on Reform of the International Financial and Monetary System, which also released its report in September 2009 (published as The Stiglitz Report). Since the crisis, he has played an important role in the creation of the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET), which seeks to reform the discipline so it is better equipped to find solutions for the great challenges of the 21st century.
Stiglitz serves on numerous boards, including the Acumen Fund and Resources for the Future.
Stiglitz helped create a new branch of economics, "The Economics of Information," exploring the consequences of information asymmetries and pioneering such pivotal concepts as adverse selection and moral hazard, which have now become standard tools not only of theorists, but also of policy analysts. He has made major contributions to macroeconomics and monetary theory, to development economics and trade theory, to public and corporate finance, to the theories of industrial organization and rural organization, and to the theories of welfare economics and of income and wealth distribution. In the 1980s, he helped revive interest in the economics of R&D.
His work has helped explain the circumstances in which markets do not work well, and how selective government intervention can improve their performance. In the last 15 years, he has written a series of highly popular books that have had an enormous influence in shaping global debates including Globalization and Its Discontents (2002), Fair Trade for All (2005, with Andrew Charlton) and Making Globalization Work (2006), amongst many others.
Stiglitz's work has been widely recognized. Among his awards are more than 40 honorary doctorates, including from Cambridge and Oxford Universities. In 2010, he was awarded the prestigious Loeb Prize for this contributions to journalism. Among the prizes awarded to his books have been the European Literary Prize, the Bruno Kreisky Prize for Political Books and the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award. He is a fellow of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the Econometric Society, and a corresponding fellow of the Royal Society and the British Academy. In 2015, Stiglitz was named to Politico’s list of the 50 thinkers, doers and visionaries transforming American politics today.