Definition
Sir James Alexander Mirrlees is a Scottish economist and winner of the 1996 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. He was knighted in 1998.
James A. Mirrlees
What is ‘James A. Mirrlees’
An economist who won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics in 1996, along with William Vickrey, for his work on information asymmetry as it relates to taxation and moral hazard problems. Mirrlees believes that the tax system should be used to improve equality, and determined that the optimal marginal tax rate should be only about 20%. Furthermore, he determined that this optimal rate could efficiently be applied to everyone, not just the rich, providing justification for a flat tax rate.
Explaining ‘James A. Mirrlees’
Mirrlees’ primary research interests include optimal income taxation, imperfect rationality and principal/agent situations with multidimensional choice variables. He also helped to develop the Diamond-Mirrlees efficiency theorem along with Peter A. Diamond.
Mirrlees was born in Scotland in 1936. He has worked as an emeritus professor of political economy at the University of Cambridge and as a fellow of Trinity College. He has also taught at Oxford.
Further Reading
- Information and incentives: The economics of carrots and sticks – academic.oup.com [PDF]
- Project appraisal and planning twenty years on – academic.oup.com [PDF]
- 10 Global Public Economics – books.google.com [PDF]
- Asymmetric information and public economics: The Mirrlees-Vickrey Nobel prize – www.aeaweb.org [PDF]
