Christina Romer | |
|---|---|
 | |
| 25th Chair of theCouncil of Economic Advisers | |
| In office January 29, 2009 – September 3, 2010 | |
| President | Barack Obama |
| Preceded by | Edward Lazear |
| Succeeded by | Austan Goolsbee |
| Personal details | |
| Born | Christina Duckworth (1958-12-25)December 25, 1958 (age 66) Alton, Illinois, U.S. |
| Political party | Democratic |
| Spouse | David Romer |
| Education | College of William & Mary (BA) Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MA,PhD) |
Christina Duckworth Romer (néeDuckworth; born December 25, 1958) is the Class of 1957 Garff B. Wilson Professor of Economics at theUniversity of California, Berkeley and a former chair of theCouncil of Economic Advisers in theObama administration.[1][2] She resigned from her role on the Council of Economic Advisers on September 3, 2010.[3]
After her nomination and before the Obama administration took office, Romer worked with economistJared Bernstein to co-author the administration's plan for recovery from the 2008 recession.[4] In a January 2009 video presentation,[5] she discussed details of thejob creation program that the Obama administration submitted to Congress.
Romer was born inAlton, Illinois. She graduated fromGlenOak High School inCanton, Ohio in June 1977. She obtained herbachelor's degree in economics fromThe College of William & Mary in 1981, and herPh.D. from theMassachusetts Institute of Technology in 1985. Her doctoral advisors wereRudi Dornbusch[6] andPeter Temin.[6] Upon completion of her doctorate, she started working as anassistant professor atPrinceton University. In 1988 she moved to theUniversity of California, Berkeley and was promoted to full professor in 1993.
Romer's early work focused on a comparison of macroeconomic volatility before and afterWorld War II. 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.[7]
She has also researched the causes of theGreat 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.[8] 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 ofgold in 1933–1934, and later from the flight of European capital to the relatively stable US as war in Europe became more likely.[9]
She has done work on fiscal and monetary policy from the Great Depression to the present, using notes from the meetings of theFederal Open Market Committee (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,[10] and that the members of the FOMC could at times have made better decisions by relying more closely on forecasts made bythe Fed professional staff.[11]
Her recent work (withDavid Romer) 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).[12] 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."[13] 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."[14]
She is a former vice president of theAmerican Economic Association, aJohn Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship recipient, a fellow of theAmerican Academy of Arts and Sciences, a winner of the Berkeley Distinguished Teaching Award, and a winner of theCouncil for Economic Education's Visionary Award.[15] Professor Romer is co-director of the Program in Monetary Economics at theNational Bureau of Economic Research,[16] and was a member of the NBER Business Cycle Dating Committee until she resigned from this position on November 25, 2008.[17] She rejoined the NBER Business Cycle Dating Committee in 2010, and still serves in this position, alongside her husband.[18]
In 2008, Romer was set to join theHarvard University faculty of economics, while her husband was offered a position at the university'sHarvard Kennedy School. However, the Romers remained at Berkeley afterDrew Gilpin Faust, Harvard's president, vetoed her appointment.[19] 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" economists to her "New Keynesian" tendencies, or a reluctance to appoint MIT-trained faculty at Harvard.[20]
Romer is a professor at theUniversity of California, Berkeley"s Department of Economics. In 2021, she was named aFellow of the Econometric Society,[21] andOmicron Delta Epsilon, the international honor society for economics, awarded her the biennial John R. Commons Award.[22]
Romer was approached by theObama transition team in November 2008 about the position ofCEA chair because of her deep knowledge of theGreat Depression.[23] In late 2008, along with fellow economic advisorsLarry Summers andPeter R. Orszag, she presented then-President-electBarack Obama with recommendations for a stimulus package.[24] Romer calculated that a $1.8-trillion package was necessary to fill theoutput 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.[25] 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.[23]
In late October 2011, Romer published an editorial inThe New York Times calling uponFederal Reserve ChairBen Bernanke to begin targetingnominal GDP, citing arguments made by economistsGreg Mankiw,Robert Hall, andScott Sumner.[26][27][28]
She is married toDavid Romer, her classmate at MIT and her colleague in the economics department atUniversity of California, Berkeley. They have adjoining offices in the department,[29] and collaborate on much of their research.[30] The couple have three children together.[31] She is not related toPaul Romer, the economist famous for his work onendogenous growth theory, although she has a son with the same name.[32]
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| Political offices | ||
|---|---|---|
| Preceded by | Chair of theCouncil of Economic Advisers 2009–2010 | Succeeded by |
| Academic offices | ||
| Preceded by | President of theAmerican Economic Association 2022–2023 | Succeeded by |
 | ||
* indicates acting officeholders | ||
