Short answers, pulled from the story.
Stiglitz shared the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2001 with George A. Akerlof and A. Michael Spence for laying the foundations of the theory of markets with asymmetric information. His most celebrated contribution was on screening, the technique by which one economic agent extracts private information from another, and on how incomplete information prevents markets from achieving social efficiency.
Stiglitz was fired from his role as senior vice president and chief economist of the World Bank for expressing dissent with the institution's policies. Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers reportedly petitioned for his removal in 2000. The bank's External Affairs office publicly claimed his post had simply been abolished rather than that he had been dismissed.
The Shapiro-Stiglitz model, published in 1984, explains why unemployment persists even in competitive labor markets without minimum wage laws. It argues that because workers can choose their effort level and firms cannot cheaply monitor that effort, firms keep wages above market-clearing levels to deter shirking, which means unemployment must rise during recessions rather than wages falling to restore full employment.
The Henry George theorem, named by Stiglitz after the nineteenth-century land-tax advocate, holds that an optimal supply of local public goods can be entirely financed through capture of the land rents those goods generate, when population distribution is optimal. Competition for access to a public good raises nearby land values by at least as much as the good costs to provide, making a land rent tax sufficient to fund public investment.
In Globalization and Its Discontents, Stiglitz argued that the IMF prescribed policies conforming to textbook economics but damaging to the developing countries that followed them, because those policies ignored incomplete information, inadequate markets, and unworkable institutions that characterize newly developing economies. He placed significant blame on the IMF for the failure of many developing nations to actually develop.
Stiglitz was born on the 9th of February 1943 in Gary, Indiana. He attended Amherst College as a National Merit Scholar and studied at MIT during his senior year before earning his PhD from MIT between 1966 and 1967. He also held a Fulbright Scholarship at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge and a Junior Research Fellowship at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, before holding academic positions at Yale, Stanford, Oxford, and Princeton.