March 8, 2021
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Gerald Jaynes
Gerald Jaynes, the newly named A. Whitney Griswold Professor of Economics, African American Studies, and Urban Studies, studies race relations and the economic conditions of African Americans and immigrants. His appointment was effective January 1.
Jaynes is a member of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. In the field of economics, he is known for the Jaynes-Hellwig-Glosten Allocation, which describes an equilibrium outcome achieved in markets where trading agents have insufficient information about each other. Jaynes’ book, “Branches Without Roots: Genesis of the Black Working Class in the American South” (1986), revised economists’ and historians’ understanding of the economics of Reconstruction and the origins of sharecropping in the American South. He has also worked as a consultant to federal and local government agencies and served in a number of public capacities, including as study director of the Committee on The Status of Black Americans at the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences from 1985 to 1989.