Richard Thaler was born in New Jersey in 1945. He attended Case Western Reserve University and received his bachelor degree in economics in 1967. He continued his studies and got a masters in economics from University of Rochester. Thaler also received his PhD in 1974 in economics from the same university.
Douglass C. North was born in 1920 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He attended college at the University of California in Berkeley and majored in political science, economics and philosophy. Upon graduation, he decided to pursue his studies in law school, but it coincided with World War II. As he later wrote in his autobiography, “because of the strong feeling that I did not want to kill anybody, I joined the Merchant Marine when I graduated from Berkeley”. The three years he spent on the sea provided him with a great opportunity to read, and these readings convinced him to become...