A welcome home
By 2000, Eric Maskin needed a break. Then the Louis Berkman Professor of Economics at Harvard, his days were a blur of graduate student advising, teaching, and committee meetings. Wanting more time to pursue his research, he did the improbable: He left Harvard. Now, the prodigal economist has returned. “It’s interesting, coming back to this department, how many of the same people are still here,” Maskin said one afternoon, his spacious Littauer Center office still half-buried under cardboard boxes. “They even look pretty much the same — maybe a little bit grayer.” Maskin brought back a few gray hairs of his own after more than a decade at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in Princeton, N.J. But when he returned to the department as a professor of economics in January, he was also toting a hefty gold medal — the 2007 Nobel Prize in economics. Maskin received the honor for a career’s worth of...