Economic Expert and Influential Thinker on Fiscal Stability and Government Policy

One of the world’s foremost economists and an influential commentator on our financial turmoil, Robert Barro is widely respected for his insights into the role of the government and private markets in the current recession, and the behavior of the Federal Reserve. His views on the federal stimulus package, financial regulation, the troubles besetting the European Union, and the intensifying competition with Asia often appear in  in the Wall Street Journal, where he served as contributing editor, the Economist, Bloomberg, and Business Week, where he has been a viewpoint columnist.

Barro is a Professor of Economics at Harvard University, a senior fellow of the Hoover Institution of Stanford University, a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, and a visiting scholar at American Enterprise Institute. He is also co-editor of the Quarterly Journal of Economics and served as President of the Western Economic Association.

Barro first gained acclaim during the 1970′s when he turned his back on the Keynesian macroeconomics he had learned as a graduate student at Harvard and became a key figure in the Chicago School–led revolution that supplanted it. His research is widely credited with raising critical questions concerning the role for government in a nation’s economy.

Along with his frequent articles, Barro has written one of the definitive academic textbooks in economics: Macroeconomics: A Modern Approach as well as Economic Growth, Nothing Is Sacred: Economic Ideas for the New Millennium, Determinants of Economic Growth, and Getting It Right: Markets and Choices in a Free Society, all from MIT Press.