Robert J. Gordon

Biography

Robert J. Gordon is Stanley G. Harris Professor in the Social Sciences and Professor of Economics at Northwestern University.

Robert J. Gordon earned his undergraduate degree at Harvard and then attended Oxford University on a Marshall Scholarship. He received his PhD in 1967 at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and taught at Harvard University and the University of Chicago before taking up his post at Northwestern in 1973. He is a Distinguished Fellow of the American Economic Association and a Fellow of both the Econometric Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, a Research Fellow of the Centre for Economic Policy Research in London and the Observatoire Français des Conjunctures Economiques) in Paris. He is an economic adviser to the Bureau of Economic Analysis.

He is one of the world’s leading experts on inflation, unemployment and productivity growth. His recent works on the rise and fall of American economic growth, the stalling of European productivity growth and the widening of the US income distribution have been widely cited. Robert J. Gordon is author of The Rise and Fall of American Growth: the US Standard of Living Since the Civil War (forthcoming 2016). He is also author of Macroeconomics, twelfth edition, which has been translated into eight languages, and of The Measurement of Durable Goods Prices, The American Business Cycle and The Economics of New Goods. His book of collected essays is Productivity Growth, Inflation, and Unemployment. His articles have been published in the American Economic Review, the Journal of Political Economy and the Brookings Papers on Economic Activity.