Institute Research Council
Frederick Henry Prince Distinguished Service Professor in Economics and the College

Nancy L. Stokey is the Frederick Henry Prince Professor of Economics, University of Chicago. Stokey is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and she is a Fellow of the Econometric Society. She has served as co-editor of Econometrica and of The Journal of Political Economy, and as vice-President of the American Economic Association.

Stokey is co-author of the influential monograph Recursive Methods in Economic Dynamics (1989), which has provided the mathematical basis for much of modern macroeconomics. She is also co-developer of a model of dynamic taxation and debt policy that has served as the foundation for much subsequent work in that area, and she is author of The Economics of Inaction (2009), which treats models that involve fixed costs of adjustment.

Stokey has also contributed to various areas of microeconomics, with the first rigorous proof of the famous Coase conjecture, and as co-developer of the No-Trade theorem, a result that presents a fundamental puzzle about information, stock market prices, and the volume of trading.

Stokey's recent work has focused on economic growth and development, especially on the role of trade and technology transfers in accelerating growth in middle-income countries.