Christopher Antoniou Pissarides, born in 1943, is a Cypriot economist and a School Professor at the London School of Economics. His research has mainly been focussed in the field of macroeconomics, specially in job search frictions explaining unemployment. Pissarides, along with Peter A. Diamond and Dale T. Mortensen were the joint winners of the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in the year 2010, for their analysis of markets with search frictions.
Pissarides’ studies have been of great contribution to the search and matching theory. He has observed the relations and interactions between the labour market and the macro economy. He is one of the developers of the matching function, a concept that tries to explain the flows from unemployment to employment, at a given moment, using empirical work to support it.
Pissarides and Mortensen wrote their famous “Job Creation and Job Destruction in the Theory of Unemployment” first published in 1994 in the Review of Economic Studies. This paper was a summation of the authors’ researches and conclusions. The Mortensen-Pissarides modelthat was forged in this work has been key in modern macroeconomics. It has a matching function that describes how workers are matched to vacancies based on a Nash’s bargaining analysis.