Professor Pissarides’ research interests focus on several topics of macroeconomics, including labor market, economic growth, and economic policy. He is mostly known for his contributions to the search and matching theory for studying the interactions between the labor market and the macro economy.

Professor Sir Christopher A. Pissarides can lay claim to at least two firsts in his academic career. He is the first Nobel Laureate from the island republic of Cyprus, with a tiny population of just over half a million. He is also the first Nobel Laureate to be appointed to the HKUST faculty, holding the IAS Helmut & Anna Pao Sohmen Professor-at-Large position. He was a joint winner of the Nobel Prize for Economic Sciences in 2010 for his search theory which explains the conditions under which the search market may be socially efficient or inefficient with so many unemployed while large numbers of job openings go begging. This is a fruitful theory with many applications beyond the labor market, from the housing market to even the marriage market. His seminal paper, jointly written with Dale Mortensen, with the title of “Job Creation and Job Destruction in the Theory of Unemployment” has evolved into the Mortensen-Pissarides model, which in one variation or another, has formed the core of many graduate economics curricula the world over. His book “Equilibrium Unemployment Theory” is now a standard reference in the study of the macroeconomics of unemployment.