Nancy Stokey is the Frederick Henry Prince Distinguished Service Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago. She earned her B.A. in economics from the University of Pennsylvania in 1972 and her Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1978. Stokey has served as a consultant to the Research Department of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis during the fall of 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2009, 2010, 2011, and 2012.
From 1988 to 1990, Stokey was the Harold L. Stuart Professor of Managerial Economics in the Department of Managerial Economics and Decision Sciences, Kellogg Graduate School of Management, Northwestern University. She also served as department chair (1987–89), professor (1983–87), associate professor (1982–83), and assistant professor (1978–82). She has been a professor of economics (1990–96) and visiting professor of economics (1983–84) at the University of Chicago, a visiting professor of economics at the University of Minnesota (spring 1983), and a visiting lecturer on economics at Harvard University (fall 1982).
Stokey was awarded an Honorary Doctor of Science degree by Northwestern University in 2005 and an Honorary Doctor of Laws degree by University of Western Ontario in 2012. She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences (elected 2004) as well as a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (elected 1993) and the Econometric Society (1988). From 1996 to 1997, she served as vice president of the American Economic Association. She has also been a member of the expert panel for the Copenhagen Consensus Center, a think-tank that focuses on the international community's effort to solve the world’s leading scientific and developmental problems of the twenty-first century.
A prolific and distinguished researcher, Stokey has served as editor of Econometrica and the Journal of Political Economy. Stokey is coauthor (with Robert E. Lucas Jr. and Edward C. Prescott) of the influential monograph Recursive Methods in Economic Dynamics (1989), which has provided the mathematical basis for much of modern macroeconomics, and she is author of The Economics of Inaction (2009), which treats models that involve fixed costs of adjustment.
Stokey has contributed to various areas of microeconomics, with the first rigorous proof of the famous Coase conjecture, and as codeveloper (with Paul Milgrom) of the No-Trade theorem, a result that presents a fundamental puzzle about information, stock market prices, and the volume of trading. She is also codeveloper (with Robert E. Lucas Jr.) of a model of dynamic taxation and debt policy that has served as the foundation for much subsequent work in that area. 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.
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