Robert Barro

Robert Barro (born 1944) is an influential macroeconomist and the Wesley Clair Mitchell Professor of Economics at Columbia University. Image File history File links From the website of the Columbia Record. ... Image File history File links From the website of the Columbia Record. ... 1944 (MCMXLIV) was a leap year starting on Saturday (link will take you to calendar). ... Macroeconomics is the study of the entire economy in terms of the total amount of goods and services produced, total income earned, the level of employment of productive resources, and the general behavior of prices. ... Columbia University is a private university in the Morningside Heights neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City. ...

Dr. Barro first reached wide notice with a 1974 paper entitled "Are Government Bonds Net Wealth?", a paper which argued that, under certain assumptions, present borrowing would be matched by increased lending in order to pay future taxes expected to pay the debt on the government bonds. This paper was direct response to the Blinder-Solow results, which had implied that the long term implications of government borrowing would be compensated for by the wealth effect. This paper is among the most cited in macro-economics, and its implications of his Ricardan Equivalence Hypothesis are still being debated in the present. In a strange twist, many neo-Keynesians now argue for fiscal restraint, while REH implies that it is possible for government debt to "crowd in" private investment, rather than "crowd out" as Blinder-Solow's results maintain. Wealth effect is the name in economics for spending rising with wealth. ... John Maynard Keynes provided the framework for synthesizing a host of economic ideas present between 1900 and 1940, and that synthesis bears his name. ...

In 1976, he authored a second influential paper, "Rational expectations and the role of monetary policy", on monetary policy and rational expectations. In it he argued that information asymmetries would cause real effects as rational economic actors in response to uncertainty, but not in response to expected monetary policy changes. While he has revisited the topic since then, and critically appraised the paper, it was important in integrating the role of money into neo-classical economics, and in the synthesis of General Equilibrium and macroeconomic models. Monetary policy is the process of managing money supply to achieve specific goals—such as constraining inflation, achieving full employment or economic growth. ... Rational expectations is a theory in economics originally proposed by John F. Muth (1961). ...

In 1983 he applied this information asymmetry argument to the role of central banks, and concluded that central banks, in order to have credibility in inflation fighting, have to be locked into inflation targets that they cannot violate to reduce unemployment. (See also Monetarism, Phillips Effect, Inflation) This line of thinking has been influential in the creation of the Maastricht treaty for the European Central Bank. Monetarism is a set of views concerning the determination of national income and monetary economics. ... The Phillips Effect in economics is a hypothesized relationship between accelerating inflation and payroll employment. ... The Maastricht Treaty (formally, the Treaty on European Union) was signed on 7 February 1992 in Maastricht between the members of the European Community and entered into force on 1 November 1993, under the Delors Commission. ...

His 1984 Macroeconomics textbook remains a standard for explaining the subject, and his 1995 book, with Columbia University economist Xavier Sala-i-Martin, on Economic Growth is a widely cited and read graduate-level textbook on the the theory and evidence concerning long-run economic growth. Macroeconomics is the economics sub-field of study that considers aggregate behavior, i. ... Columbia University is a private university in the Morningside Heights neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City. ... Xavier Sala-i-Martin (b. ...

Another work which is cited is a paper where he was a co-author with Gary Becker A Reformulation of the Economic Theory of Fertility, published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, which is influential in thinking about "infinite time horizon" modelling. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, or QJE, is an economics journal published by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. ...

In the last decade, Dr. Barro has begun investigating the influence of religion and popular culture on political economy, working with his wife Rachel McCleary.

Dr. Barro's work has been central to many of the economic and public policy debates of the last 30 years, including business cycle theory, growth theory, the neo-classical synthesis and public policy.

References

• Are Government Bonds Net Wealth? (1974), Journal of Political Economy.
• Rational expectations and the role of monetary policy (1976). Monetary Economy 2:1-32.

External links

• Dr. Barro's web page.