- Person
- Ben Bernanke
- Lived
- b. 1953
- Field
- Economics
- From
- American
The story
Long before he led the Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke was a teacher. After a PhD at MIT in 1979, supervised by Stanley Fischer, he taught at Stanford's Graduate School of Business from 1979 to 1985, rising from assistant to associate professor. He then moved to Princeton, where he held named professorships and chaired the economics department from 1996 to 2002. He also held visiting posts at New York University and MIT, gave lectures at the London School of Economics on monetary theory and policy, and served as a visiting scholar at several regional Federal Reserve banks.
Bernanke wrote two textbooks. One, an intermediate macroeconomics text, was coauthored with Andrew Abel and in later editions Dean Croushore and reached a sixth edition by 2007. The other, an introductory book covering both microeconomics and macroeconomics, was written with Robert H. Frank. Both introduced students to the workings of the economy.
His research publications were just as extensive. He wrote many articles on monetary policy, macroeconomics and economic history, including his influential 1983 study of the Great Depression and a 1992 paper with Alan Blinder on how the federal funds rate transmits monetary policy, along with several scholarly books, among them a 2001 study of inflation targeting. According to IDEAS/RePEc he is among the 50 most published economists in the world.
He also served the economics profession. In July 2001 he became editor of the American Economic Review, which Brookings describes as the profession's leading research journal. He directed the Monetary Economics Program of the National Bureau of Economic Research and sat on its Business Cycle Dating Committee. He has held Guggenheim and Sloan fellowships and is a fellow of the Econometric Society and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
In 2019, after his years in public office, the profession elected him president of the American Economic Association, and in 2022 he shared the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for the research he had begun as a young professor.
Why it matters
Through his textbooks and editorial work, Bernanke helped train and inform a generation of economics students and researchers.
About Ben Bernanke
Economist of the Great Depression who chaired the Federal Reserve through the 2008 financial crisis and shared the 2022 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for research on banks and crises.
More about Ben Bernanke
- Ben Bernanke won a Nobel for explaining bank collapsesBen Bernanke shared the 2022 Nobel economics prize for showing how bank runs turned the 1930s downturn into the deep and prolonged Great Depression.
- Ben Bernanke recorded crisis lessons for future leadersBen Bernanke wrote The Courage to Act (2015) and coauthored Firefighting (2019) with Timothy Geithner and Henry Paulson to pass on lessons from the 2008 crisis.
- Ben Bernanke showed how credit crunches deepen recessionsIn a 1983 paper Ben Bernanke showed that the financial chaos of 1930–33 made credit scarce and costly, a mechanism later called the financial accelerator.
Sources
- Ben Bernanke Wikipedia
- Ben S. Bernanke Brookings Institution
- Ben Bernanke Jewish Virtual Library
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