José A. Scheinkman

José Alexandre Scheinkman (born January 11, 1948) is a Brazilian-American mathematical economist, currently the Theodore A. Wells '29 Professor of Economics at Princeton University. He spent the bulk of his career at the University of Chicago, where he served as department chair immediately prior to his departure for Princeton. Prior to immigrating to the United States to study for his PhD in Economics at the University of Rochester, he grew up and was educated in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. While his research interests have spanned a wide range of topics, he is best known for his work in mathematical economics (particularly dynamic optimization) and finance, oligopoly theory and the social economics of cities and crime; he also help spur the development of work at the intersection of economics, finance and physics. Scheinkman also famously pioneered the now-ubiquitous application of academic financial theory to practical risk management of fixed incomes during a leave he took as Vice President in the Financial Strategies Group at Goldman, Sachs & Co. during the late 1980s.Since coming to Princeton, Scheinkman's research has focused increasingly on finance (both applied, in his work on bubbles, and mathematical, in his work with Lars Hansen). He continues his involvement in practical finance as a founder and partner of Axiom Investments, a successful hedge fund. as well as in the public affairs of Brazil through writing and consulting. He is also well known as the thesis adviser of prominent economists including Paul Romer, Albert (Pete) Kyle, Edward Glaeser, Tano Santos, Alberto Bisin and Glen Weyl. He is a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences and a Fellow of the Econometric Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.He is married to the New York psychotherapist Michele Scheinkman and is the father of Andrei Scheinkman.Scheinkman's parents, Samuel and Sara, were members of Rio de Janeiro's small Jewish community. As leftists, his parents were dissidents during the military government in Brazil from 1964-85. Scheinkman studied for his BA in economics (1969) and MA in Mathematics (1970) at the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro and the Instituto de Matemática Pura e Aplicada, also in Rio. During his studies he met his future wife, Michele Zitrin, at an annual summer retreat taken by many Jews in Rio. Together and married at the age of 22, they moved to New York so that he could study for his PhD under Lionel McKenzie and Buzz Brock at the University of Rochester. Two years into his PhD, eventually granted in 1974, Scheinkman was hired as an assistant professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Chicago, where he spent the next 26 years, with the support of Brock who had moved there.After only three years, Scheinkman was promoted to tenure as an associate professor in 1978 and eventually as a full professor in 1981. While at Chicago, Scheinkman helped build the foundation of mathematical economics at at department often better known for economic intuition than rigorous theory. Scheinkman also participated actively in the interface between economics and physics organized by the Santa Fe Institute and often traveled to visiting positions in France, a country for which he has had a lifetime affection. He served as chair of the Department of Economics from 1995-1998. Following his chairmanship, Scheinkman moved to New York City, and Princeton University, in 1999.Scheinkman is perhaps most closely associated with his classic six page paper from 1979 with L. M. Benveniste "On the Differentiability of the Value Function in Dynamic Models of Economics", which provides conditions on model primitives allowing for the standard differentiable treatment of infinite-horizon dynamic models.[5] At least as influential, however, is his very different work with David Kreps in 1983 showing that "Quantity precommitment and Bertrand competition yield Cournot outcomes" and thus provi