Olivier Blanchard

Biography

Olivier Blanchard has been Economic Counsellor and Director of the Research Department at the International Monetary Fund (IMF) since 2008. A citizen of France, he has spent most of his professional life in Cambridge in the United States. After obtaining his PhD in Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1977, he taught at Harvard University, returning to MIT in 1982, with which he has been affiliated ever since. He is the Robert M. Solow Professor of Economics and former Chair of the Economics Department. He has been on leave from MIT since taking up his current position at the IMF.

He is a macroeconomist, who has worked on a wide set of issues, from the role of monetary policy through the nature of speculative bubbles, the nature of the labor market and the determinants of unemployment and transition in former communist countries, to forces behind the current crisis. In the process, he has worked with numerous countries and international organisations. He is the author of many books and articles, including two textbooks on macroeconomics, one at the graduate level with Stanley Fischer, one at the undergraduate level.

He is a fellow and former member of the Council of the Econometric Society, former Vice President of the American Economic Association and a member of the American Academy of Sciences.

Paper