Peter Kenen

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Peter B. Kenen (b. November 30, 1932) is a Senior Fellow in International Economics at the Council on Foreign Relations and Walker Professor of Economics and International Finance at Princeton University. He was born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1932, earned his B.A. from Columbia University and his Ph.D. from Harvard. He taught at Columbia from 1957 to 1971, where he served as Chairman of the Department of Economics and then Provost of the University. He was Director of the International Finance Section at Princeton from 1971 to 1999. He is best known for his work on the theory of optimum currency areas, in which he argued that groups of countries with diversified domestic production are more likely to constitute optimum currency areas than groups whose members are highly specialized.

Kenen’s publications include British Monetary Policy and the Balance of Payments, which won the David A. Wells Prize at Harvard; Asset Markets, Exchange Rates and Economic Integration (with Polly Allen); Managing Exchange Rates; Economic and Monetary Union in Europe; The International Financial Architecture; and International Economic and Financial Cooperation (with Jeffrey Shafer, Nigel Wicks, and Charles Wyplosz). He is currently collaborating with Ellen E. Meade on another book, Monetary Integration, to be published in 2007. He has edited several books, including Managing the World Economy and Understanding Interdependence, and was co editor of the two volume Handbook of International Economics. He has published numerous articles in scholarly journals, many of which have been reprinted in two volumes: Essays in International Economics and Exchange Rates and the Monetary System.

Kenen has been a consultant to the Council of Economic Advisers, the Office of Management and Budget, the Federal Reserve, the International Monetary Fund, and the U.S. Treasury. He was a member of President Kennedy's Task Force on Foreign Economic Policy, the Review Committee on Balance of Payments Statistics, and the Economic Advisory Panel of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Group of Thirty. He was President of the Eastern Economic Association in 2000-01.

He has held research fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, and the German Marshall Fund, and he has been a Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, a Guggenheim Fellow, and Ford Research Professor at the University of California. In 1983-84, he was a Professorial Fellow at the Australian National University; in 1987-88, he was a Visiting Fellow at the Royal Institute of International Affairs; in 1991-92, he held the Houblon-Norman Fellowship at the Bank of England; and in 2002, he was Professorial Fellow at the Victoria University of Wellington and the Reserve Bank of New Zealand.