Thorvaldur Gylfason

Education

In 1973 he received the B.A. degree in Economics at the University of Manchester. He received the PhD degree in Economics at Princeton University in 1976.

Career

Thorvaldur Gylfason has been Professor of Economics at the University of Iceland since 1983. He was Visiting Professor of Public and International Affairs at Princeton in 1986-1988. Prior to this he was an economist at the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in Washington from 1976 to 1981.

Thorvaldur has been active in international policy debate as a Research Fellow at CESifo (Center for Economic Studies) at the University of Munich, Research Associate at the Center for U.S.-Japan Business and Economic Studies at New York University, and Fellow of the European Economic Association. He was Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for International Economic Studies at Stockholm University in 1978-1996, and Research Fellow at CEPR (Centre for Economic Policy Research) in London in 1987-2009. In recent years, he has been a frequent consultant to the International Monetary Fund and also the World Bank, the European Commission, and the European Free Trade Association (EFTA). He was chairman of the failed Icelandic bank Kaupthing from 1986 to 1990.

Publications

In the field of economics, Thorvaldur Gylfason has published numerous books, scientific papers in international journals and scholarly articles in his native Icelandic. He co-authored a book on the market economy that has been translated into seventeen languages, including Russian and Chinese.

Public debate

Þorvaldur has written regular columns on a wide range of subjects in the Icelandic newspaper Fréttablaðið since the early 2000s. He has been more prominent since the banking collapse of 2008.

Private life

Thorvaldur Gylfason is the son of former Finance Minister Gylfi Þorsteinsson Gíslason and brother of philosopher Thorsteinn Gylfason and politician Vilmundur Gylfason. He is married.