Professor Bengt Holmstrom has been appointed to serve as head of the Department of Economics for a three-year term, which became effective July 1. Holmstrom, who also was recently appointed to a second term as the Paul A. Samuelson Professor of Economics, succeeds Professor Olivier Blanchard.
Holmstrom received the Ph.D. at Stanford University and joined MIT in 1994. He has a joint appointment in the Sloan School of Management. An economic theorist, he specializes in the economics of contracting and organization.
A version of this article appeared in MIT Tech Talk on September 24, 2003.