Oded Galor

Oded Galor (Hebrew: עודד גלאור; born 1953) is an Israeli-American economist who is currently Herbert H. Goldberger Professor of Economics at Brown University. He is the founder of unified growth theory.

Galor completed his BA and MA at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and his PhD at Columbia University. He served as a Chilewich Professor of Economics at the Hebrew University, and he is currently the Herbert H. Goldberger Professor of Economics at Brown University.

He was awarded Doctorate Honoris Causa from Nicolaus Copernicus University, Athens University of Economic and Business (AUEB), UCLouvain, and Poznań University of Economics & Business. He is an Elected Foreign Member of Academia Europaea (honoris causa), and an Elected Fellow of the Econometric Society.  He has led the NBER research group on Income Distribution and Macroeconomics and he is a Research Fellow of the CEPR and IZA, a Research Associate of the NBER and CESifo, a Sackler Fellow at Tel-Aviv University, a Fellow of the Economics Department at the Hebrew University. Furthermore, he is the editor in chief of the Journal of Economic Growth, editor of the Journal of Population Economics, co-editor of Macroeconomic Dynamics. He was recently among the 5 candidates for the Nobel of Frankfurter Allgemeine.

Oded Galor is the founder of unified growth theory, which explores the process of development over the entire course of human history and identifies the historical and prehistorical forces behind the differential transition timing from stagnation to growth and the divergence in income per capita across countries and regions.

He is a co-author of the Galor–Zeira model—the first macroeconomic model to explore the role of heterogeneity in the determination of macroeconomic behavior. In contrast to the representative agent approach that dominated the field of macroeconomics until the early 1990s and argued that heterogeneity has no impact on macroeconomic activity, the model demonstrates that in the presence of capital markets imperfections and local non-convexities in the production of human capital, income distribution affects the long run level of income per-capita as well as the growth process. The Review of Economic Studies named the paper among the 11 most path-breaking papers published in the journal in the past 60 years.

Galor and his colleagues have used evolutionary approach in order to explain the origins of more particular elements of economic and social behavior.

This book provides an introduction to discrete dynamical systems—a framework of analysis commonly used in the fields of biology, demography, ecology, economics, engineering, finance, and physics. The book characterizes the fundamental factors that govern the qualitative and quantitative trajectories of a variety of deterministic, discrete dynamical systems, providing solution methods for systems that can be solved analytically and methods of qualitative analysis for systems that do not permit or necessitate an explicit solution. The analysis focuses initially on the characterization of the factors the govern the evolution of state variables in the elementary context of one-dimensional, first-order, linear, autonomous systems. The fundamental insights about the forces that affect the evolution of these elementary systems are subsequently generalized, and the determinants of the trajectory of multi-dimensional, nonlinear, higher-order, non-autonomous dynamical systems are established.

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