Christopher Pissarides is an economist. He is the School Professor of Economics & Political Science and Regius Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics. His research interests focus on several topics of macroeconomics, notably labour, economic growth, and economic policy. In 2010, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics, jointly with Peter A. Diamond and Dale Mortensen, for his contributions to the theory of search frictions and macroeconomics.

Christopher Pissarides is mostly known for his contributions to the search and matching theory for studying the interactions between the labour market and the macro economy. He helped develop the concept of the matching function (explaining the flows from unemployment to employment at a given moment of time), and pioneered the empirical work on its estimation. Pissarides has also done research on structural change and growth.

Pissarides’ most influential paper is arguably “Job Creation and Job Destruction in the Theory of Unemployment” , published in the Review of Economic Studies in 1994. This paper built on the previous individual contributions that both authors had made in the previous two decades.

The Mortensen–Pissarides model that resulted from this paper has been exceptionally influential in modern macroeconomics. In one or another of its extensions or variations, today it is part of the core of most graduate economics curricula throughout the world.

Pissarides’ book Equilibrium Unemployment Theory, a standard reference in the literature of the macroeconomics of unemployment, is now in its second edition, and was revised after Pissarides’ joint work with Mortensen, resulting in the analysis of both endogenous job creation and destruction.