Berkeley Couple Tackle Top Fiscal Issues of the Day (Christina Romer, New Obama Advisor)

UC Berkeley ^ | Kate Rix

[jessduntno]

Berkeley Couple Tackle Top Fiscal Issues of the Day By Kate Rix

At a time when there is enormous need for experts in fiscal policy and monetary policy, it would be hard to do better than Professors Christina Romer and David Romer, a husband-and-wife team has studied the history of U.S. monetary policy from the Great Depression to today, looking at why it has sometimes gone wrong—as in the 1970s, when it produced a decade of high inflation—and sometimes gone right—as in both the 1950s and the 1990s, when inflation was low and the economy stable.

In addition to doing research, Romer and Romer have consulted with Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. They also hold two seats on the committee that decides when the U.S is officially in a recession. In spite of plummeting global stock markets and the U.S. bailout, that committee has made no recent declaration.

“Quite often the recession is over before we say that we’re in one,” says Christina Romer, seated in a small sunny conference room near the pair’s offices in Evans Hall.

It is typical of this highly collaborative couple for one to pick up on a point made by the other. They joined Berkeley’s Economics Department in 1989 as junior faculty. Since then they have both received endowed chairs: Christina is the Class of 1957 Professor of Economics; David, the Herman Royer Professor in Political Economy.

They are macroeconomists, working together on big questions. One line of their recent research looks at the ways that tax cuts affect both the economy and the government budget. They started by poring over 5,000 pages of documents in order to eliminate tax changes that were in fact responses to other developments directly affecting the economy and the budget.

[jessduntno]

Intersting article direct from Berkley Edu...

[BuckyKat]

Can anything good come out of Berkeley?

[Deb]

Oh, goody, back to the days of employing talkers in government instead of actual doers.

Are you a Left-Wing professor of things instead of a participant? Step up and get your (Democrat) government job!!

[Maine Mariner]

In this case there can. Both are respected economists with no heavy left-wing anti-free market bias. David Romer earned his PhD.D. in economics from the University of Chicago (after Milton Friedman retired). His work on economic growth is first rate.

[nufsed]

They probably live in Vacaville.!

[pierrem15]

and the 1990s, when inflation was low and the economy stable.

Except for the fact that the 90's were marked by a huge speculative bubble in stocks...

The press and the academy are more and more like The Great Soviet Encyclopedia: every time The Party was in power was golden, every time The Hated-Racist-Party-Of-The-Rich was in power, a disaster!

[Syncro]

In addition to doing research, Romer and Romer have consulted with Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. They also hold two seats on the committee that decides when the U.S is officially in a recession. In spite of plummeting global stock markets and the U.S. bailout, that committee has made no recent declaration.

“Quite often the recession is over before we say that we’re in one,” says Christina Romer, seated in a small sunny conference room near the pair’s offices in Evans Hall.

So in other words they have these positions for no other reason than to make them money.

Nice to be paying for them sitting around in the sun.