Ken Rogoff | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Chief Economist of the International Monetary Fund | |
| In office August 2001 – September 2003 | |
| President | Horst Köhler |
| Preceded by | Michael Mussa |
| Succeeded by | Raghuram Rajan |
| Personal details | |
| Born | (1953-03-22)March 22, 1953 (age 72) Rochester, New York, U.S. |
| Spouses | |
| Education | Yale University(BA,MA) Massachusetts Institute of Technology(PhD) |
| Website | University website |
| Academic background | |
| Doctoral advisor | Rudi Dornbusch[2] |
| Academic work | |
| Discipline | Financial economics |
| Institutions | Harvard University |
| Doctoral students | Gita Gopinath[3] |
| Website | |
| Chess career | |
| Country | United States |
| Title | Grandmaster (1978) |
| Peak rating | 2520 (January 1977) |
| Peak ranking | No. 61 (January 1980) |
Kenneth Saul Rogoff (born March 22, 1953) is an Americaneconomist andchessGrandmaster.
He is the Thomas D. Cabot Professor of Public Policy and professor of economics atHarvard University. During theGreat Recession, Rogoff was an influential proponent ofausterity.[4][5]
Rogoff grew up inRochester, New York. His father was a professor of radiology at theUniversity of Rochester.
Rogoff received aBA andMA fromYale Universitysumma cum laude in 1975,[6] and aPhD inEconomics from theMassachusetts Institute of Technology in 1980.[6]
At sixteen Rogoff dropped out of high school to concentrate on chess. At that time he metBobby Fischer, who was impressed by Rogoff's "self-assured style and his knowing exactly what he wanted over the chessboard".[7] He won the United States Junior Championship in 1969 and spent the next several years living primarily in Europe and playing in tournaments there. However, at eighteen he made the decision to go to college and pursue a career in economics rather than to become a professional player, although he continued to play and improve for several years afterward. Rogoff was awarded the IM title in 1974, and the GM title in 1978. He was 3rd in the World Junior Championship of 1971 and finished 2nd in the US Championship of 1975, which doubled as a Zonal competition, a half point behindWalter Browne; this result qualified him for the 1976Interzonal atBiel where he finished 13–15th. In other tournaments, he drew for first at Norristown in 1973 and at Orense in 1976.[8] He has also drawn individual games against former world championsMikhail Tal[9] andTigran V. Petrosian.[10] In 2012 he drew a blitz game with the world's highest rated playerMagnus Carlsen.[11]
Early in his career, Rogoff served as an economist at theInternational Monetary Fund (IMF), and at theBoard of Governors of the Federal Reserve System.
Rogoff was the Charles and Marie Robertson Professor of International Affairs atPrinceton University.[12]
In 2002, Rogoff was in the spotlight because of a dispute withJoseph Stiglitz, former chief economist of theWorld Bank and 2001Nobel Prize winner. After Stiglitz criticized the IMF in his book,Globalization and Its Discontents, Rogoff replied in an open letter.[13] He is also a regular contributor to the non-profit media organizationProject Syndicate since 2002.
Fellow economistAlan Blinder credits both Rogoff andCarmen Reinhart with describing highly relevant aspects of the2008 financial institution near-meltdown andresulting serious recession.[14]
In a normal recession such as1991 or2000, theKeynesian tools oftax cuts and infrastructure spending (fiscal stimulus), as well as lowered interest rates (monetary stimulus), will usually right the economic ship in a matter of months and lead torecovery andeconomic expansion. Even theserious recession of 1982, which Blinder states "was called the Great Recession in its day," fits comfortably within this category of a normal recession which will respond to the standard tools.[14]
By contrast, the 2008 near-meltdown destroyed parts of the financial system and left other parts reeling and in serious need ofde-leveraging. Large amounts of governmental debt,household debt,corporate debt, and financial institution debt were left in its wake. And because of this debt, the normal tools of tax cuts and increased infrastructure spending were somewhat less available and/or politically difficult to achieve. (Fiscal policy at times even ended up becoming pro-cyclical, which it was in some European countries under austerity policies.) In the United States, economistPaul Krugman argued that even the combination of theOct. 2008 bailout plus theFeb. 2009 bailout was not big enough, although Blinder states that they were large compared to previous bailouts. And, since interest rates were already near zero, the standard monetary tool of lowering rates was not going to provide much help.[14]
Recovery from what Blinder terms a Reinhart-Rogoff recession may require debt forgiveness, either directly, or implicitly through encouraging somewhat higher than normal rates of inflation. "Not your father’s recovery policies," writes Blinder.[14]
During the2010 United Kingdom general election, Rogoff contributed to an open letter toThe Sunday Times endorsing theConservative Party and Shadow Chancellor of the ExchequerGeorge Osborne's demands forgreater austerity during theEuropean debt crisis.[4]
In April 2013, Rogoff was at the center of worldwide attention withCarmen Reinhart (coauthor of the bookThis Time is Different) when their widely cited study "Growth in a Time of Debt" was shown to contain computation errors which critics claim undermine its central thesis that too much debt causes low growth.[5][15] An analysis byThomas Herndon, Michael Ash andRobert Pollin argued that "coding errors, selective exclusion of available data, and unconventional weighting of summary statistics led to serious errors that inaccurately represent the relationship between public debt and GDP growth among 20 advanced economies in thepost-war period."[16][17] Their calculations demonstrated that some high-debt countries grew at 2.2 percent rather than the−0.1 percent figure initially cited by Reinhart and Rogoff.[16] Rogoff and Reinhart claimed that their fundamental conclusions were accurate after correcting the coding errors detected by their critics.[18][19] They disavowed their claim that a 90% governmentdebt-to-GDP ratio is a specific tipping point for growth outcomes.[20] The subject remains controversial, because of the political ramifications of the research, though in Rogoff and Reinhart's words "[t]he politically charged discussion ... has falsely equated our finding of a negative association between debt and growth with an unambiguous call for austerity."[20]
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His bookThis Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly, which he co-authored withCarmen Reinhart, was released in October 2009.[21]
InThe Curse of Cash, published in 2016, he urged that the United States phase out the100-dollar bill, then the50-dollar bill, then the20-dollar bill, leaving only smaller denominations in circulation.[22]
His 2025 bookOur Dollar, Your Problem explores the global rise of the U.S. dollar and shows why its future stability is far from assured.[23]
Media related toKenneth Rogoff at Wikimedia Commons
| Diplomatic posts | ||
|---|---|---|
| Preceded by | Chief Economist of the International Monetary Fund 2001–2003 | Succeeded by |