Christina Duckworth Romer (née Duckworth; born December 25, 1958) is the Class of 1957 Garff B. Wilson Professor of Economics at the
University of California, Berkeley
The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...
and a former chair of the
Council of Economic Advisers in the
Obama administration. She resigned from her role on the Council of Economic Advisers on September 3, 2010.
After her nomination and before the Obama administration took office, Romer worked with economist
Jared Bernstein
Jared Bernstein (born 1955) is an American economist. He is a senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. From 2009 to 2011, Bernstein was the chief economist and economic adviser to Vice President Joe Biden in the Obama Admini ...
to co-author the administration's plan for recovery from the 2008 recession. In a January 2009 video presentation, she discussed details of the
job creation program
Unemployment, according to the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development), is people above a specified age (usually 15) not being in paid employment or self-employment but currently available for work during the referenc ...
that the Obama administration submitted to Congress.
Early life
Romer was born in
Alton, Illinois
Alton ( ) is a city on the Mississippi River in Madison County, Illinois, Madison County, Illinois, United States, about north of St. Louis, St. Louis, Missouri. The population was 25,676 at the 2020 United States Census, 2020 census. It is a p ...
. She graduated from
GlenOak High School in
Canton, Ohio in June 1977. She obtained her
bachelor's degree
A bachelor's degree (from Middle Latin ''baccalaureus'') or baccalaureate (from Modern Latin ''baccalaureatus'') is an undergraduate academic degree awarded by colleges and universities upon completion of a course of study lasting three to six ...
in economics from
The College of William & Mary
The College of William & Mary (officially The College of William and Mary in Virginia, abbreviated as William & Mary, W&M) is a public research university in Williamsburg, Virginia. Founded in 1693 by letters patent issued by King William I ...
in 1981, and her
Ph.D.
A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, Ph.D., or DPhil; Latin: or ') is the most common degree at the highest academic level awarded following a course of study. PhDs are awarded for programs across the whole breadth of academic fields. Because it is ...
from the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the ...
in 1985. Her doctoral advisors were
Rudi Dornbusch and
Peter Temin
Peter Temin (; born 17 December 1937) is an economist and economic historian, currently Gray Professor Emeritus of Economics, MIT and former head of the Economics Department.
Education
Temin graduated from Swarthmore College in 1959 before earnin ...
Upon completion of her doctorate, she started working as an
assistant professor
Assistant Professor is an academic rank just below the rank of an associate professor used in universities or colleges, mainly in the United States and Canada.
Overview
This position is generally taken after earning a doctoral degree
A docto ...
at
Princeton University
Princeton University is a private research university in Princeton, New Jersey. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and one of the ...
. In 1988 she moved to the
University of California, Berkeley
The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...
and was promoted to full professor in 1993.
Research
Romer's early work focused on a comparison of macroeconomic volatility before and after
World War II
World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposing ...
. Romer showed that much of what had appeared to be a decrease in volatility was due to better economic data collection, although recessions have become less frequent over time.
She has also researched the causes of the
Great Depression in the United States and how the US recovered from the depression. Her work showed that the Great Depression occurred more severely in the US than in Europe, and had somewhat different causes than the Great Depression in Europe. Romer showed that New Deal fiscal policy measures, though innovative, were very insufficient, and dwarfed by Hoover's tax increase two years earlier. However, accidental monetary policy played a large role in the US recovery from depression. This monetary policy came first from the devaluation of the dollar in terms of
gold
Gold is a chemical element with the symbol Au (from la, aurum) and atomic number 79. This makes it one of the higher atomic number elements that occur naturally. It is a bright, slightly orange-yellow, dense, soft, malleable, and ductile me ...
in 1933–1934, and later from the flight of European capital to the relatively stable US as war in Europe became more likely.
She has done extensive work on fiscal and monetary policy from the Great Depression to the present, using notes from the meetings of the
Federal Open Market Committee
The Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), a committee within the Federal Reserve System (the Fed), is charged under United States law with overseeing the nation's open market operations (e.g., the Fed's buying and selling of United States Treas ...
(FOMC) and the materials prepared by Fed staff to study how the Federal Reserve makes its decisions. Her work suggests that some of the credit for the relatively stable economic growth in the 1950s should lie with good policy made by the Federal Reserve, and that the members of the FOMC could at times have made better decisions by relying more closely on forecasts made by
the Fed professional staff.
Her recent work (with
David Romer
David Hibbard Romer (born March 13, 1958) is an American economist, the Herman Royer Professor of Political Economy at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of a standard textbook in graduate macroeconomics as well as many influ ...
) has focused on the impact of tax policy on government and general economic growth. This work looks at the historical record of US tax changes from 1945 to 2007, excluding "endogenous" tax changes made to fight recessions or offset the cost of new government spending. It finds that such "exogenous" tax increases, made for example to reduce inherited budget deficits, reduce economic growth (though by smaller amounts after 1980 than before). Romer and Romer also find "no support for the hypothesis that tax cuts restrain government spending; indeed ... tax cuts may increase spending. The results also indicate that the main effect of tax cuts on the government budget is to induce subsequent legislated tax increases." However, she notes that "Our baseline specification suggests that an exogenous tax increase of one percent of GDP lowers real GDP by roughly three percent."
Career
She is a former vice president of the
American Economic Association, a
John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship recipient, a fellow of the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences
The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (abbreviation: AAA&S) is one of the oldest learned societies in the United States. It was founded in 1780 during the American Revolution by John Adams, John Hancock, James Bowdoin, Andrew Oliver, a ...
, a winner of the
Berkeley Distinguished Teaching Award, and a winner of the
Council for Economic Education
The Council for Economic Education (the new name, since 2009 January, of the National Council on Economic Education) is an organization in the United States that focuses on the economic and financial education of students from kindergarten throug ...
's Visionary Award. Professor Romer is co-director of the Program in Monetary Economics at the
National Bureau of Economic Research
The National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) is an American private nonprofit research organization "committed to undertaking and disseminating unbiased economic research among public policymakers, business professionals, and the academic c ...
, and was a member of the NBER Business Cycle Dating Committee until she resigned from this position on November 25, 2008. She rejoined the NBER Business Cycle Dating Committee in 2010, and still serves in this position, alongside her husband.
In 2008 Romer was set to join the
Harvard faculty of economics, while her husband was offered a position at the university's
Kennedy School of Government
The Harvard Kennedy School (HKS), officially the John F. Kennedy School of Government, is the school of public policy and government of Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The school offers master's degrees in public policy, public ...
. However, the Romers remained at Berkeley after
Drew Gilpin Faust
Catharine Drew Gilpin Faust (born September 18, 1947) is an American historian and was the 28th president of Harvard University, the first woman to serve in that role. She was Harvard's first president since 1672 without an undergraduate or gradu ...
, Harvard's president, vetoed her appointment. Her decision resulted in substantial discussion within the discipline and in the mass media. The motivations for Faust's decision to block Romer's appointment remain unclear, though speculation has focused on an opposition among "
New Classical
New classical macroeconomics, sometimes simply called new classical economics, is a school of thought in macroeconomics that builds its analysis entirely on a neoclassical framework. Specifically, it emphasizes the importance of rigorous foundat ...
" economists to her "
New Keynesian
New Keynesian economics is a school of macroeconomics that strives to provide microeconomic foundations for Keynesian economics. It developed partly as a response to criticisms of Keynesian macroeconomics by adherents of new classical macroec ...
" tendencies, or a reluctance to appoint MIT-trained faculty at Harvard.
Today, Romer is a professor at the University of California Berkeley Department of Economics. In 2021, she was named a
Fellow of the Econometric Society
In the scientific discipline of economics, the Econometric Society is a learned society devoted to the advancement of economics by using mathematical and statistical methods. This article is a list of its (current and in memory) fellows.
Fellows
...
, and
Omicron Delta Epsilon
Omicron Delta Epsilon ( or ODE) is an international honor society in the field of economics, formed from the merger of Omicron Delta Gamma and Omicron Chi Epsilon, in 1963. Its board of trustees includes well-known economists such as Robert Luc ...
, the international honor society for economics, awarded her the biennial John R. Commons Award.
Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers
Romer was approached by the
Obama transition team in November 2008 about the position of
CEA chair because of her deep knowledge of the
Great Depression.
In late 2008, along with fellow economic advisors
Larry Summers
Lawrence Henry Summers (born November 30, 1954) is an American economist who served as the 71st United States secretary of the treasury from 1999 to 2001 and as director of the National Economic Council from 2009 to 2010. He also served as pres ...
and
Peter R. Orszag
Peter Richard Orszag (born December 16, 1968) is the CEO of Financial Advisory at Lazard. Before June 2019, he was the firm's Head of North American M&A and Global Co-Head of Healthcare.
Orszag previously served as a Vice Chairman of Corporate ...
, she presented then-President-elect
Barack Obama
Barack Hussein Obama II ( ; born August 4, 1961) is an American politician who served as the 44th president of the United States from 2009 to 2017. A member of the Democratic Party, Obama was the first African-American president of the ...
with recommendations for a stimulus package. Romer calculated that a $1.8-trillion package was necessary to fill the
output gap, but Summers rejected the proposal and opted not to include it in the memo fearing that a trillion-dollar package would not pass through Congress. The Obama administration ultimately passed an
$800-billion package.
She left the CEA to return to the University of California at Berkeley in September 2010, saying her departure from the Obama administration was timed so that her youngest child could begin high school in Berkeley.
In late October 2011, Romer published an editorial in ''
The New York Times
''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid d ...
'' calling upon
Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke to begin targeting
nominal GDP
Gross domestic product (GDP) is a money, monetary Measurement in economics, measure of the market value of all the final goods and services produced and sold (not resold) in a specific time period by countries. Due to its complex and subjec ...
, citing arguments made by economists
Greg Mankiw
Nicholas Gregory Mankiw (; born February 3, 1958) is an American macroeconomist who is currently the Robert M. Beren Professor of Economics at Harvard University. Mankiw is best known in academia for his work on New Keynesian economics.
Mankiw ...
,
Robert Hall, and
Scott Sumner
Scott B. Sumner (born 1955) is an American economist. He is the Director of the Program on Monetary Policy at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, a Research Fellow at the Independent Institute, and professor who teaches at Bentley ...
.
Family
She is married to
David Romer
David Hibbard Romer (born March 13, 1958) is an American economist, the Herman Royer Professor of Political Economy at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of a standard textbook in graduate macroeconomics as well as many influ ...
, her classmate at MIT and her colleague in the economics department at
University of California, Berkeley
The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...
. They have adjoining offices in the department, and collaborate on much of their research. The couple have three children together. She is not related to
Paul Romer, the economist famous for his work on
endogenous growth theory, although she has a son with the same name.
References
External links
Christina Romer's pageat
UC Berkeley
The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant uni ...
*
Minneapolis Fed Magazine profile on Christina and David Romer*
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{{DEFAULTSORT:Romer, Christina
1958 births
Living people
20th-century American economists
20th-century American educators
20th-century American women educators
21st-century American economists
21st-century American educators
21st-century American women educators
American women economists
Chairs of the United States Council of Economic Advisers
College of William & Mary alumni
Economists from Illinois
Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
Fellows of the Econometric Society
Massachusetts Institute of Technology alumni
National Bureau of Economic Research
Obama administration cabinet members
People from Alton, Illinois
Presidents of the American Economic Association
Princeton University faculty
University of California, Berkeley faculty
Women members of the Cabinet of the United States