Short answers, pulled from the story.
George Akerlof was awarded the 2001 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, jointly with Michael Spence and Joseph Stiglitz, for their analyses of markets with asymmetric information. His most cited contribution was the 1970 paper "The Market for Lemons: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism," published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics.
The paper, published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics in 1970, argues that when one party in a transaction knows more than the other, markets can break down. Akerlof used the used car market as his primary example, showing that information asymmetry drives high-quality sellers out of the market and leaves buyers with only inferior goods.
George Akerlof is married to Janet Yellen, a fellow economist who served as chair of the Federal Reserve and as United States Secretary of the Treasury. They met during Akerlof's visiting year at the Federal Reserve Board of Governors in Washington, D.C. in 1977, and married in 1978.
Identity economics is a field that incorporates social identity and group norms into formal economic analysis. George Akerlof and Rachel Kranton of Duke University founded it, with their foundational article "Economics and Identity" appearing in the Quarterly Journal of Economics in 2000.
Akerlof argued in articles published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics and the Economic Journal that modern contraceptives and legal abortion had paradoxically increased out-of-wedlock childbearing rather than reducing it. His analysis held that the availability of these technologies shifted social expectations in ways that reduced pressure on biological fathers to marry or support partners.
Akerlof spent most of his career at the University of California, Berkeley, where he was named Koshland Professor of Economics Emeritus in 2010. He also taught at the London School of Economics, held a visiting position at the Indian Statistical Institute in New Delhi, worked at the White House Council of Economic Advisers, served as a visiting scholar at the International Monetary Fund from 2010 to 2014, and joined Georgetown University's McCourt School of Public Policy in 2014.