Former World Bank chief economist Joseph Stiglitz has been appointed to a joint professorship at Columbia's Graduate School of Business, Department of Economics and the School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA). Stiglitz, currently a professor of economics at Stanford University and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, begins teaching at Columbia in the fall 2001 semester.

Stiglitz is one of the giant figures in economics of the last 50 years. He has made seminal and fundamental contributions to every subfield of economic theory -- microeconomics, macroeconomics, industrial organization, international economics, labor economics, financial economics and development economics. He has published more than 300 papers, as well as a dozen books, in a 35-year career.

His career began at Yale, where he became a tenured professor at the age of 27. Stiglitz has also been a faculty member at Princeton, Oxford and Stanford universities. At the age of 29, he became a Fellow of the Econometric Society and is a member of the National Academy of Science. Stiglitz is also the recipient of the prestigious John Bates Clark Medal, awarded every two years to the American economist under the age of 40 who has made the most significant contributions to the subject.

Not content to confine his talents to academia, Stiglitz has become influential in the making and evaluation of economic policy in the last decade. He served on President Clinton's Council of Economic Advisers -- first as a member and later as chairman with cabinet rank. He was later named chief economist of the World Bank. Since January 2000, Stiglitz has been a visiting professor at Columbia's Graduate School of Business and Department of Economics in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. He plans to locate his new Initiative for Policy Dialogue at SIPA. The Initiative for Policy Dialogue, which is funded with substantial foundation support, aims to provide an alternative to the International Monetary Fund and World Bank for countries in need of sound economic policy advice.