Edward Christian Prescott (December 26, 1940 – November 6, 2022) was an American economist. He received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics in 2004, sharing the award with Finn E. Kydland, "for their contributions to dynamic macroeconomics: the time consistency of economic policy and the driving forces behind business cycles". This research was primarily conducted while both Kydland and Prescott were affiliated with the Graduate School of Industrial Administration (now Tepper School of Business) at Carnegie Mellon University. According to the IDEAS/RePEc rankings, he was the 19th most widely cited economist in the world in 2013. In August 2014, Prescott was appointed an Adjunct Distinguished Economic Professor at the Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra, Australia. Prescott died of cancer on November 6, 2022, at the age of 81. Biography Early life Prescott was born in Glens Falls, New York, to Mathilde Helwig Prescott and William Clyde Prescott. In 1962, he received his bachelor's degree in mathematics from Swarthmore College, where he was a member of the Delta Upsilon fraternity. He then received a master's degree from Case Western Reserve University in operations research in 1963, and a PhD in economics at Carnegie Mellon University in 1967. Career From 1966 to 1971, Prescott taught at the University of Pennsylvania. He then returned to Carnegie Mellon until 1980, when he moved to the University of Minnesota, where he taught until 2003. In 1978, he was a visiting professor at the University of Chicago, where he was named a Ford Foundation Research Professor. In the following year, he visited Northwestern University and stayed there until 1982. From 2003 on he taught at Arizona State University. Prescott was an economic advisor at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis since 1981. In 2004, he held the Maxwell and Mary Pellish Chair in Economics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. In 2006, he held the Shinsei Bank Visiting Professorship at New York University. In August 2014, Prescott was appointed an Adjunct Distinguished Professor at Research School of Economics (RSE) of the Australian National University. The Research Papers in Economics project ranked him as the 19th most influential economist in the world as of August 2012 based on his academic contributions. More recently working as an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis and as a professor at Arizona State University's W. P. Carey School of Business, he was a major figure in macroeconomics,