George Akerlof is Senior Resident Scholar at the IMF since 2010 and Koshland Professor of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley. A 2001 recipient of the Nobel Prize in Economic Science (shared with Michael Spence and Joseph Stiglitz), he was honored for his theory of asymmetric information and its effect on economic behavior. He researches a range of topics, including crime, discrimination, family problems, financial markets, German unification, macroeconomics, monetary policy, poverty and unemployment. He is also well known for his efficiency wage hypothesis, which suggests that wages are determined by the efficiency goals of employers in addition to supply and demand forces.