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      Dr. Michael Spence

      Dr. Michael Spence

      Professor

      Stanford University

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      Michael Spence
      He is the Philip H. Knight Professor Emeritus of Management in the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University, a Senior Fellow of the Hoover Institution at Stanford and a Distinguished Visiting Fellow of the Council on Foreign Relations. He is an Senior Professor at Bocconi University in Milan, and an Honorary Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford University, and a Distinguished Academic Visitor at Queens’ College, Cambridge.
      In 2001, he received the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for his work in the field of information economics.
      He is the author of “The Next Convergence: The Future of Economic Growth in a Multispeed World,” Farrar, Straus and Giroux (May 10, 2011). His new book, written with Gordon Brown, Mohamed El-Erian and Reid Lidow is “Permacrisis: How to Fix a Fractured World,” Simon and Schuster, Sept 2023.
      He is a Senior Advisor to Jasper Ridge Partners and a Senior Advisor to General Atlantic Partners. He chairs the Advisory Boards of the Asia Global Institute and the MBZ University of Artificial Intelligence. He was the Chairman of The Independent Commission on Growth and Development (2006-2010). He is a member of the Advisory Councils of the Luohan Academy in Hangzhou and the Digital Economy Lab at Stanford. He served as Dean of the Stanford Business School from 1990 to 1999 and Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University from 1984 to 1990.
      He was awarded the John Kenneth Galbraith Prize for excellence in teaching and the John Bates Clark Medal, awarded to American economists under age 40 for a "significant contribution to economic thought and knowledge."
      From 1984 to 1990, Spence served as the dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard, overseeing Harvard College, the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and the Division of Continuing Education.
      From 1977 to 1979, he was a member of the Economics Advisory Panel of the National Science Foundation and in 1979 served as a member of the Sloan Foundation Economics Advisory Committee. At various times, he has served as a member of the editorial boards of American Economics Review, Bell Journal of Economics, Journal of Economic Theory, and Public Policy.

      Speaking at SFF 2026