Kenneth S. Rogoff

Senior Fellow for Economics

Expert Bio

Kenneth Rogoff is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and the Thomas D. Cabot professor at Harvard University. From 2001–2003, Rogoff served as chief economist at the International Monetary Fund.

His 2009 book with Carmen Reinhart, This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly has been very widely cited by academics, policymakers and journalists. One regularity that Reinhart and Rogoff illustrate is the remarkable quantitative similarities across time and countries in the run-up and the aftermath of severe financial crises. In general, they show that for financial crises, the differences between emerging markets and advanced countries are far less pronounced than previously believed. Rogoff is also known for his seminal work on exchange rates and on central bank independence. His treatise Foundations of International Macroeconomics (jointly with Maurice Obstfeld) is the standard graduate text in the field worldwide. His new book, The Curse of Cash (September 2016) argues the case for phasing out large denomination paper currency (but not going cashless) and why this would help fight crime and tax evasion while enabling monetary policy to be more effective in deep recessions. His monthly syndicated column on global economic issues is published in over fifty countries.

Rogoff is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Group of Thirty, and a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. Rogoff is among the top ten on RePec’s ranking of economists by scholarly citations. He is also an international grandmaster of chess.

affiliations

Harvard University, Thomas D. Cabot professor of public policy and professor of economics
Project Syndicate, columnist

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