Sir Tony Atkinson CBE FBA |
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Tony Atkinson at the Festival of Economics in Trento, May 2015
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Born |
Anthony Barnes Atkinson 4 September 1944 Caerleon, Wales, UK |
Died | 1 January 2017 Oxford, England, UK |
(aged 72)
Nationality | British |
Spouse(s) | Judith Mandeville |
Institution |
Nuffield College, Oxford London School of Economics |
Field | Economics of income distribution, poverty, micro-economics |
School or tradition |
Neo-Keynesian economics |
Alma mater | Cambridge University |
Doctoral students |
John Micklewright |
Influences | James Meade |
Information at IDEAS / RePEc |
Sir Anthony Barnes "Tony" AtkinsonCBE FBA (4 September 1944 – 1 January 2017) was a British economist, Senior Research Fellow of Nuffield College, Oxford, and Centennial Professor at the London School of Economics.
A student of James Meade, Atkinson virtually single-handedly established the modern British field of inequality and poverty studies. He worked on inequality and poverty for over four decades.
Atkinson attended Cranbrook School. After considering studying mathematics, he graduated from the University of Cambridge in 1966 with a first-class degree before spending time at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He cited his interest in inequality as beginning from volunteering in a German hospital in the 1960s.
He served as Warden of Nuffield College, Oxford, from 1994 to 2005. Before that he held positions at the University of Cambridge, University College London, the London School of Economics, the University of Essex and the University of Oxford. He also edited the Journal of Public Economics.
Atkinson's work was predominantly on income distributions. There is an inequality measure named after him: the Atkinson index. In a joint article with Joseph Stiglitz, he laid one of the cornerstones for the theory of optimal taxation.