Oded Galor

Oded Galor is an Israeli-American economist at Brown University and the founder of unified growth theory.

born 1953Founding unified growth theoryThe Galor-Zeira modelEvolutionary approaches to economic behavior

Occupation: economist, researcher
Education: Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Columbia University

Oded Galor was born in 1953 in Jerusalem

Oded Galor was born in Jerusalem in 1953. His father owned the Galor printing house. He finished high school at Ironi Gimel high school.

He earned his BA and MA at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He completed his PhD at Columbia University in 1984.

Galor was Chilewich Professor of Economics at the Hebrew University and became Herbert H. Goldberger Professor of Economics at Brown University. He is editor in chief of the Journal of Economic Growth and has led the NBER research group on Income Distribution and Macroeconomics. He holds honorary doctorates from several universities, including UCLouvain and Poznań.

His unified growth theory studies development across human history and why regions moved from stagnation to growth at different times. With Joseph Zeira he wrote a model showing that income distribution affects long-run income and growth. He has also used evolutionary approaches to study fertility, risk aversion and loss aversion.

Oded Galor's life in 6 milestones

1953
Born in Jerusalem.
1984
Completed his PhD at Columbia University.
2010
Published the book Discrete Dynamical Systems.
2013
The Review of Economic Studies named the Galor-Zeira paper among 11 path-breaking papers in its past 60 years.
2020
Named among 5 Nobel candidates by the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.
2021
Became a Fellow of the Econometric Society.