NYU Recruits Nobel Prize Winner from Stanford

Posted by: Louis Lavelle on February 23, 2010

There must be a lot of gloating going on down at New York University’s Stern School of Business (Stern Full-Time MBA Profile) these days. As Bloomberg reported yesterday, Stern had a bit of a coup, persuading Andrew Michael Spence, a Nobel laureate in economics, to leave the sunny environs of the Stanford Graduate School of Business (Stanford Full-Time MBA Profile) and join Club Stern in lower Manhattan.

As Bloomberg reported, NYU President John Sexton attributed Spence’s decision to leave Stanford to the university’s “efforts at faculty building.” In a statement, he added: “An economist of his reputation only joins an institution where he knows there is a robust intellectual environment and he will have colleagues of the highest caliber.”

Spence shared the 2001 Nobel prize in economics with George Akerlof from the University of California, Berkeley, and Joseph Stiglitz, from Columbia University. At Stanford, he’s a professor emeritus and a fellow at the Hoover Institution. He’s also an adviser at Oak Hill Investment Management, based in Menlo Park, Calif., and a consultant for Pacific Investment Management Co., based in Newport Beach, Calif. He starts at NYU on Sept. 1.