Awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2001, together with Joseph E. Stiglitz and George A. Akerlof for their research on markets with asymmetry of information.
Currently Spence is senior fellow at the Hoover Institute and Philip H. Knight professor emeritus of management at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business and President of the Commission on Growth and Development, an independent commission created in 2006 and focused on the reduction of poverty in developing countries. He was Dean of Stanford Business School from 1990 to 1999