Economics Professor Oliver Hart Knighted By King Charles III

Economics professor Oliver S.D. Hart was made a knight by King Charles III, the British government announced last week.

Hart, who received a 2016 Nobel Prize in Economics for his work in contract theory, was made a Knight Bachelor as part of the King’s birthday honors. The Knight Bachelor is the oldest knighthood in the United Kingdom.

The 74-year-old joined the Harvard faculty in 1993, chaired the Economics department from 2000 to 2003, and in 2020, was appointed a University professor — Harvard’s highest faculty rank.

In a Monday interview, Hart said he had known about the honor for a few weeks before the announcement after a call from the British consulate in Boston.

“I happened to be in my office and the phone rang, and I don’t normally answer calls these days because it’s usually spam. But for some reason I picked it up,” he said. “I didn’t think it was going to happen, so it was a very nice surprise.”

Edward L. Glaeser, the chair of the Economics department, praised Hart in an interview Monday, saying he was “delighted.”

“It’s a reflection of the high degree to which Oliver is held in scholarly circles, but I think it's also a reflection that he has been a larger service for the world,” Glaeser said. “He has given a framework to the world that has been genuinely useful.”

Hart is not the first Harvard affiliate to be knighted. In 2005, Donald M. Berwick ’68, a faculty member at the Harvard Medical School and Harvard School of Public Health, became one of very few Americans to be named an honorary knight when Queen Elizabeth II made him a Commander of the British Empire.

Seven years later, in 2012, S. Allen Counter, a neuroscience professor and the founding director of the Harvard Foundation for Intercultural and Race Relations, was knighted by King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden. In 2021, HSPH epidemiology professor Albert Hofman was named a knight of the Order of the Lion of the Netherlands.

Hart said that the process for receiving a knighthood is “pretty secretive.”

“I couldn’t tell you why I got it,” he said, adding that after being informed of the honor “they swear you to secrecy.”

“Of course, I told my wife and very close members of my family, but basically, I didn’t tell anybody,” he said. “So you have to sit there for a little over four weeks, without being able to tell people, which is quite challenging.”

Hart will head to the United Kingdom likely some time next year for his investiture ceremony, but said it is unclear which member of the royal family will formally “put the sword on my shoulder.”

Glaeser said that while “there is no one who is in the world of economics who does not know of Oliver Hart,” media coverage of the knighthood might reach people outside of the field who “may be interested in what he did — they may learn from that.”

“I think that’s always the upside of this, is the idea that more people will learn some economics because of something like this,” Glaeser added.

—Staff writer Rahem D. Hamid can be reached at rahem.hamid@thecrimson.com.

—Staff writer Elias J. Schisgall can be reached at elias.schisgall@thecrimson.com. Follow him on Twitter @eschisgall.