The importance of the IZA Prize in Labor Economics is best reflected in the composition of the IZA Prize Committee. IZA is proud to have George Akerlof (University of California, Berkeley) and Gary Becker (University of Chicago), two winners of the Nobel Prize in Economics, as members of the IZA Prize Committee. They are joined by CEPR President Richard Portes. Responsible for the coordination of the selection process are IZA Director Klaus F. Zimmermann and IZA Research Director Armin Falk. IZA Prize Committee Members do not participate in the official nomination process and are not eligible for the award.

George A. Akerlof is Professor of Economics at the University of California at Berkeley. His research borrows from sociology, psychology, anthropology and other fields to determine economic influences and outcomes. His interests include macroeconomics, poverty, family problems, crime, discrimination, monetary policy and German unification. He was co-winner of the Nobel Prize 2001 in Economics for his analysis of markets with asymmetric information.

Richard Portes is Professor of Economics at the London Business School. He is Founder and President of the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR), Directeur d'Etudes at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Secretary-General of the Royal Economic Society and Senior Editor and Co-Chairman of the Board of Economic Policy. His research interests include international macroeconomics, international finance and European integration.

Joseph E. Stiglitz is University Professor at Columbia University, New York. He was a member of the Council of Economic Advisors from 1993-95 and served as CEA chairman from 1995-97. He then became Chief Economist and Senior Vice President of the World Bank from 1997-2000. In 2001, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics. Stiglitz helped create a new branch of economics, "The Economics of Information" and has made major contributions to macroeconomics and monetary theory, to development economics and trade theory, to public and corporate finance, to the theories of industrial organization and rural organization, and to the theories of welfare economics and of income and wealth distribution.

Armin Falk is Research Director at IZA and Professor of Economics at the University of Bonn. He is also Director of the Bonn Laboratory of Experimental Economics, Visiting Faculty Member at Central European University and a Fellow of CEPR and CESifo. His main research interests are in Behavioral and Personnel Economics.

Klaus F. Zimmermann is IZA Director and President of the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW Berlin). He is Professor of Economics at the University of Bonn, Honorary Professor of Economics at the Free University of Berlin, and Editor of the Journal of Population Economics. His research has focused on labor economics, population economics, migration, industrial organization, and econometrics

Gary S. Becker is University Professor at the Department of Economics and Sociology, University of Chicago. His current research focuses on habits and addictions, formation of preferences, human capital, and population growth. He won the Nobel Prize 1992 in Economics for having extended the domain of microeconomic analysis to a wide range of human behavior and interaction, including nonmarket behavior. He was a member of the IZA Prize Committee from 2002 to 2004.

James J. Heckman is the Henry Schultz Distinguished Service Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago. His recent research dealt with such issues as evaluation of social programs, econometric models of discrete choice and longitudinal data, the economics of the labor market, and alternative models of the distribution of income. He was co-winner of the Nobel Prize 2000 in Economics for his development of theory and methods for analyzing selective samples. He was a member of the IZA Prize Committee in 2002 and 2003.

Gerard A. Pfann is Professor of Econometrics and Management Science at Maastricht University and served as IZA Research Director until July 2003. He is also Founder and Director of the Business Investment Research Center (BIRC) at Maastricht University. His research interests are empirical econometrics applied to labor economics, investment decision making, human resource management, and industrial organization. He was a member of the IZA Prize Committee in 2002 and 2003.