Jean-Jacques Laffont

Who was Jean-Jacques Laffont?

Jean-Jacques Marcel Laffont was a French economist specializing in public economics and information economics. Educated at the University of Toulouse and the Ecole Nationale de la Statistique et de l'Administration Economique in Paris, he was awarded the Ph.D. in Economics by Harvard University in 1975.

Laffont taught at the École Polytechnique, and was Professor of Economics at Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales and at the University of Toulouse I. In 1991, he founded Toulouse's Industrial Economics Institute which has become one of the most prominent European research centres in economics. From 2001 until his death, he was the inaugural holder of the University of Southern California's John Elliott Chair in Economics. Over the course of his career, he wrote 17 books and more than 200 articles.