Olivier Blanchard

Olivier Blanchard is the Fred Bergsten Senior Fellow at the Peterson Institute and Robert Solow Professor of Economics Emeritus at MIT. He is a past President of the American Economic Association. He spent most of his career at MIT, but moved to Washington in 2008 to be the IMF's Chief Economist (Economic Counsellor and Director, Research Department), a post he retired from in 2015. His research interests are in macroeconomics, including a wide set of issues that range from the role of monetary policy to the nature of speculative bubbles, to the nature of the labour market and the determinants of unemployment, to transition in former communist countries, to the global financial crisis. He is the author of many books and articles, including two textbooks in macroeconomics, one at the graduate level with Stanley Fischer and one at the undergraduate level. He is a past Chair of the MIT economics department, a Fellow and past Council Member of the Econometric Society, a past President of the American Economic Association, and a member of the American Academy of Sciences.