Sir James Alexander Mirrlees FRSE FBA (born 5 July 1936) is a Scottish economist and winner of the 1996 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. He was knighted in 1998.

Born in Minnigaff, Wigtownshire, Mirrlees was educated at the University of Edinburgh and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was a very active student debater. One contemporary, Quentin Skinner has suggested that Mirrlees was a member of the Cambridge Apostles along with fellow Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen during this period. Between 1968 and 1976, Mirrlees was a visiting professor at MIT three times. He taught at both Oxford University (1969–1995) and University of Cambridge (1963- and 1995-).

During his time at Oxford he published papers on economic models for which he would eventually be awarded his Nobel Prize. They centred on situations in which economic information is asymmetrical or incomplete, determining the extent to which they should affect the optimal rate of saving in an economy. Among other results, they demonstrated the principles of "moral hazard" and "optimal income taxation" discussed in the books of William Vickrey. The methodology has since become the standard in the field.

Mirrlees and Vickrey shared the 1996 Nobel Prize for Economics "for their fundamental contributions to the economic theory of incentives under asymmetric information".

Mirrlees is also co-creator, with MIT Professor Peter A. Diamond of the Diamond-Mirrlees Efficiency Theorem, developed in 1971.

Mirrlees is emeritus Professor of Political Economy at the University of Cambridge, and Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. He spends several months a year at the University of Melbourne, Australia. He is currently the Distinguished Professor-at-Large of The Chinese University of Hong Kong as well as University of Macau. In 2009, he was appointed Master of the Morningside College of The Chinese University of Hong Kong, along with the biologist Samuel Sun Sai-ming.

Mirrlees is a member of Scotland's Council of Economic Advisers.

Publications

• "Payroll-tax financed social insurance with variable retirement" (with P. A. Diamond), Scandinavian Journal of Economics, 1986
• "Taxing Uncertain Incomes", Oxford Economic Papers, 1990
• "Project Appraisal and Planning Twenty Years On" (with I.M.D. Little), in Proceedings of the World Bank Annual Conference on Development Economics 1990 (eds. Stanley Fischer, Dennis de Tray and Shekhar Shah), 1991
• "Optimal Taxation of Identical Consumers when markets are incomplete" (with P.A. Diamond), in Economic Analysis of Markets and Games (ed. Dasgupta, Gale, Hart and Maskin), 1992
• "Optimal Taxation and Government Finance" in Modern Public Finance (eds. Quigley and Smolensky), 1994
• "Welfare Economics and Economies of Scale", Japanese Economic Review, 1995
• "Private Risk and Public Action: The Economies of the Welfare State", European Economic Review, 1995

1. ^ http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/laureates/1996/mirrlees-cv.html
2. ^ • Peter A. Diamond and James A. Mirrlees (1971). "Optimal Taxation and Public Production I: Production Efficiency," American Economic Review, 61(1), pp. 8-27 (press +).
      • _____ (1971). "Optimal Taxation and Public Production II: Tax Rules," American Economic Review, 61(3), Part 1, pp. 261-278 (press +).
3. ^ http://www.umac.mo/economics/staff/index.html
4. ^ http://www.cuhk.edu.hk/cpr/pressrelease/060815e.htm