Dale T. Mortensen Centre
The goal of the Dale T. Mortensen Centre was to develop the theories of the deceased Nobel Prize winner Dale T. Mortensen. The American economics professor had close ties to the Department of Economics and Business Economics, and held a Niels Bohr Professorship there, funded by the Danish National Research Foundation.
Dale T. Mortensen Centre was founded in 2017 – three years after the death of Dale T. Mortensen – and ended its activities in 2022.
The centre was headed by Professor of Economics Bent Jesper Christensen, whose joint work with Dale T. Mortensen on markets with search frictions has been published internationally.
Dale T. Mortensen had been coming regularly to AU since 1982. He realized that his models involving individual waiting times and wage dispersion in the labour market could best be tested in the detailed type of register data available in Denmark.
From 2006 through 2010, Dale T. Mortensen held a Niels Bohr Professorship at AU, funded by the Danish National Research Foundation, allowing him to spend three months each fall at AU. He spent the rest of his time at Northwestern University in Chicago. He was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2010.
The goal of the Dale T. Mortensen Centre was to develop the theories of Dale T. Mortensen and build on his experiences to carry out new research on markets with search frictions.
Research
The research carried out at the Dale T. Mortensen Centre has been important for improving our understanding of the functioning of markets, and to generate better predictions and policy analyses.
The Centre carried out research on markets with search frictions, and related areas in economics and econometrics. Frictions imply that market outcomes are different than in standard models of demand and supply in economics. Frictions correspond to random arrival times of trading partners. This means random waiting times before buying or selling, and uncertainty about final transaction prices.
For example, when putting a house up for sale, it is hard to predict how fast it will be sold, and at what price. Similarly, a worker looking for employment does not know in advance how long he or she will have to keep looking before landing a job, or at what wage this will be. When shopping for a loan at the bank, there is uncertainty about what interest rate can be negotiated, and at which bank, etc.
Activities
The Dale T. Mortensen Centre held a large number of workshops, the DTMC conferences and other conferences, and was host of the Nordic Data Meeting.
