Christina Romer Biography Quotes 9 Report mistakes

Early Life and Education
Christina Duckworth Romer is an American economist known for influential scholarship on macroeconomic history and policy. She was born in 1958 and grew up in the United States, developing an early interest in economic history and the forces that drive recessions and recoveries. She earned a Bachelor of Arts in economics from the College of William & Mary in 1981, where faculty mentors encouraged her toward graduate research. She continued at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, completing a Ph.D. in economics in 1985. Her graduate training placed her in the mainstream of modern macroeconomics while nurturing a longstanding fascination with the data and narrative evidence that explain major economic events.

Academic Formation and Early Career
Romer began her academic career at Princeton University in 1985. In 1988 she joined the University of California, Berkeley, where she would build a long-term career as a professor and mentor, and where she worked closely with her husband and frequent coauthor, the economist David H. Romer. At Berkeley, she taught macroeconomics and economic history to generations of students, balancing analytical models with careful historical evidence. She also became a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, contributing to its communities in monetary economics and economic history.

Research Contributions
Romer's scholarship helped reshape understanding of the Great Depression, postwar macroeconomic volatility, and the channels through which monetary and fiscal policy influence the real economy. In work on the interwar period, she argued that monetary expansion associated with gold inflows was pivotal to the recovery from the Great Depression, reframing debates that traced recovery primarily to fiscal stimulus. Her broader research on business cycles included new measurements of prewar output and reinterpretations of the volatility of the U.S. economy across eras.

Together with David Romer, she pioneered a narrative approach to identifying policy shocks, combing historical records to distinguish deliberate and exogenous policy changes from endogenous responses to the economy. Their study of monetary policy developed a method for isolating the intentions of policymakers, echoing and testing themes from Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz while using new archival evidence. In fiscal policy, their widely cited analysis of tax changes constructed a dataset of exogenous tax actions and estimated the macroeconomic effects of those changes, establishing empirical benchmarks for tax multipliers. These contributions gave researchers and policymakers new tools to evaluate the timing, magnitude, and causal impact of policy.

Service in the Obama Administration
Romer was appointed Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) by President Barack Obama and served from early 2009 through 2010, during the depths of the global financial crisis. In the White House, she worked alongside senior economic officials including Lawrence Summers at the National Economic Council, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, and Office of Management and Budget Director Peter Orszag. Within the CEA she collaborated with members Austan Goolsbee and Cecilia Rouse. She also coordinated regularly with Federal Reserve Chair Ben S. Bernanke as the administration and the central bank attempted to stabilize financial markets and the broader economy.

In the administration's opening weeks, Romer coauthored a prominent analysis with Jared Bernstein, then economic adviser to Vice President Joe Biden, assessing the likely employment and output effects of a proposed stimulus package. The report helped shape public discussion of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and the broader case for countercyclical fiscal policy. As CEA chair, she provided the president with evidence-based assessments on recovery dynamics, the risks of deflation, and the interplay between fiscal measures and monetary accommodation. Her tenure emphasized transparent analysis and careful communication of macroeconomic trade-offs. She was succeeded at the CEA by Austan Goolsbee in 2010.

Return to Academia and Public Voice
After leaving government, Romer returned to her professorship at UC Berkeley, resuming research and teaching on macroeconomic history and policy. She continued to engage the public through speeches, essays, and testimony, explaining complex fiscal and monetary issues in accessible terms. Her post-crisis commentary often revisited lessons from the 1930s and from postwar stabilization policy, stressing the importance of credible frameworks, nimble responses to shocks, and empirically grounded evaluation of policy tools. In her academic work, she extended the narrative identification approach and contributed to debates on the size and reliability of policy multipliers.

Personal Life and Collaborations
Christina Romer's professional life has been interwoven with close collaboration with David H. Romer at Berkeley. Their joint work, associated in the literature with the "Romer and Romer" approach to policy identification, has been widely adopted by scholars evaluating the macroeconomic effects of monetary and fiscal interventions. Beyond coauthored research papers, they have influenced curricula and research agendas in macroeconomics and economic history, shaping the training of students who would go on to careers in academia, government, and the private sector.

Legacy and Influence
Romer's blend of historical depth, empirical rigor, and policy engagement places her at the intersection of scholarship and practice. Her research on the Great Depression reframed the role of monetary expansion in recovery; her narrative methods offered a blueprint for distinguishing cause from correlation in policy analysis; and her White House service placed her at the center of the policy response to one of the most severe economic downturns since the 1930s. Through collaboration with colleagues such as David Romer and engagement with policymakers including Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Jared Bernstein, Lawrence Summers, Timothy Geithner, Peter Orszag, Austan Goolsbee, Cecilia Rouse, and Ben Bernanke, she helped bridge academic research and real-time decisionmaking. Her contributions continue to inform debates over stabilization policy, fiscal design, and the measurement of economic activity across business cycles.

Our collection contains 9 quotes who is written by Christina, under the main topics: Investment - Money.