It was the first Nobel awarded to an economist whose primary appointment was in a business school.
Stigler joined the faculty of the University of Chicago in 1958. He and Merton Miller are widely recognized as turning Chicago Booth into a world leader in academic research and making it a full partner in an extraordinarily fruitful cooperative research enterprise with the university's Department of Economics and Law School.
In 1977, Stigler founded the Center for the Study of the Economy and the State, which was renamed for him after his death in 1991.
George J. Stigler鈥檚 research upended the idea that government regulation was effective at correcting private-market failures. His paper on electricity rates showed that government regulation had little effect on lowering the prices in monopolies.
He later introduced the idea of regulatory capture, in which regulators could be dominated by special interests. These regulators would work for the benefit of large, monied organizations rather than the public good. Stigler鈥檚 work forced economists to consider regulation with empirical analysis, much as they studied other economic questions.
