Bengt Holmström

Bengt Robert Holmström is the Paul A. Samuelson Professor of Economics, Emeritus, at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he was head of the Economics Department from 2003-2006. In 2011, he served as President of the Econometric Society. He is currently a Distinguished Fellow of Hanken School of Economics in Finland.

He received his doctoral degree from Stanford University in 1978. Before joining MIT in 1994, he was the Edwin J. Beinecke Professor of Management at Yale University’s School of Management (1983-94) and associate professor at the Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University (1979-82).

Holmström is a microeconomic theorist, best known for his research on the theory of contracting and incentives especially as applied to the theory of the firm, to corporate governance and to liquidity problems in financial crises. He has been a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research since 1996.

Holmström received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics 2016 (jointly with Oliver Hart).

He is a former board member of the Nokia Corporation (1999-2012), the Finnish Business and Policy Forum (EVA) (2005-2018), and Aalto University in Finland (2010-2017). Currently, he serves on the Advisory Board of the Luohan Academy, China, since 2018.