The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics

Maurice Allais

(1911- )
In 1988 Maurice Allais became the first French citizen to win the Nobel Prize in economics. He won it for his contribution to the understanding of market behavior and the efficient use of resources. Allais also showed that his insights could be applied to help set efficient prices for state-owned monopolies, of which France had many. Allais' work paralleled, and sometimes preceded, similar work done by English-speaking economists Sir John Hicks and Paul Samuelson. He also proved a result in growth theory in 1947 that had been credited to Edmund Phelps in 1961.

Allais did not get credit as early as his English counterparts because his work was in French. Commented Samuelson: "Had Allais' earliest writings been in English, a generation of economic theory would have taken a different course." Allais also helped revive the quantity theory of money (monetarism). In utility theory Allais discovered and resolved a paradox about how people behave when choosing between various risks; it is now called the Allais paradox.

From 1937 to 1944, Allais worked in the French state-owned mine administration. In 1944 he became a professor at the Ecole National Supérieure des Mines de Paris and is still there. He is also the research director at the National French Research Council. He was named an officer of the Legion of Honor in 1977.

Selected Works

"Growth and Inflation." Journal of Money, Credit and Banking 1, no. 3 (August 1969):355-426.

"A Restatement of the Quantity Theory of Money." American Economic Review 56 (December 1966):1123-57.

"The Role of Capital in Economic Development." In The Econometric Approach to Development Planning. 1965.

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