Arthur Cecil Pigou | |
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Arthur Cecil Pigou
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Born |
Ryde, Isle of Wight |
18 November 1877
Died | 7 March 1959 Cambridge |
(aged 81)
Nationality | Britain |
Institution | University of Cambridge |
Field | Welfare economics |
School or tradition |
Neoclassical economics |
Alma mater | King's College, Cambridge |
Influences | Alfred Marshall, Karl Marx |
Influenced | N. Gregory Mankiw, Alan Greenspan, Paul Volcker, Paul Krugman, John Maynard Keynes |
Contributions |
Externalities Pigou effect Pigovian tax Pigou Club |
Awards | 1899 Chancellor's Gold Medal 1903 Adam Smith Prize |
Arthur Cecil Pigou (/ˈpiːɡuː/; 18 November 1877 – 7 March 1959) was an English economist. As a teacher and builder of the school of economics at the University of Cambridge, he trained and influenced many Cambridge economists who went on to fill chairs of economics around the world. His work covered various fields of economics, particularly welfare economics, but also included Business cycle theory, unemployment, public finance, index numbers, and measurement of national output. His reputation was affected adversely by influential economic writers who used his work as the basis on which to define their own opposing views. He reluctantly served on several public committees, including the Cunliffe Committee and the 1919 Royal Commission on Income tax.
Arthur Cecil Pigou was born at Ryde on the Isle of Wight, the son of Clarence George Scott Pigou, an army officer, and his wife Nora Biddel Frances Sophia Lees, daughter of Sir John Lees, 3rd Baronet. He won a scholarship to Harrow School where he was in Newlands House and became the first modern head of school. The school's economics society is named The Pigou Society in his honour. In 1896 he was admitted to King's College, Cambridge, as a history scholar where he first read history under Oscar Browning. He won the Chancellor's Gold Medal for English Verse in 1899, and the Cobden (1901), Burney (1901), and Adam Smith prizes (1903), and made his mark in the Cambridge Union Society of which he became President in 1900. He came to economics through the study of philosophy and ethics under the Moral Science Tripos. He studied economics under Alfred Marshall, whom he later succeeded as professor of political economy. His first and unsuccessful attempt for a fellowship at King's was a thesis on "Browning as a Religious Teacher."