Book Finn Kydland

Finn Kydland is a Norwegian economist and Nobel laureate whose work reshaped how economists understand business cycles and policy credibility. He shared the 2004 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics with collaborator Edward C. Prescott for work in dynamic macroeconomics on how consistent economic policy stays over time and on the forces that drive economic booms and downturns. His ideas are central to real business cycle theory and to the concept of dynamic inconsistency, the insight that policymakers' promises can lose credibility over time. Kydland grew up the eldest of six children on a family farm in the Jæren region of southwestern Norway and found his way to economics after doing bookkeeping for a friend's mink farm. He earned his undergraduate degree at the Norwegian School of Economics in 1968 and his PhD at Carnegie Mellon in 1973 under Prescott, then taught in Norway before returning to Carnegie Mellon in 1978. He now holds the Henley chair in economics at UC Santa Barbara, is a distinguished professor emeritus at Carnegie Mellon's Tepper School of Business, and holds a part-time post at the Norwegian School of Economics. He is a Fellow of the Econometric Society.