Martin Feldstein

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Martin Feldstein
Born	November 25, 1939 (1939-11-25) (age 68) New York City, NY, USA
Residence	U.S.
Nationality	American
Fields	Economist
Institutions	Harvard University 1967- NBER 1977-82, 1984- President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board 2006- American International Group 1988- Council of Economic Advisers 1982-84
Alma mater	Oxford University (Ph.D. 1967) Harvard University (B.A. 1961)
Doctoral students	David Ellwood R. Glenn Hubbard Laurence J. Kotlikoff Lawrence Lindsey Eli Noam James Poterba Harvey S. Rosen Lawrence H. Summers
Known for	Feldstein-Horioka puzzle
Notable awards	John Bates Clark Medal (1977)

Martin Stuart "Marty" Feldstein (born November 25, 1939 in New York City) is an American economist. He is currently the George F. Baker Professor of Economics at Harvard University, and the president and CEO of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). From 1982 to 1984, Feldstein served as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers and as chief economic advisor to President Ronald Reagan (where his deficit hawk views clashed with Reagan administration economic policies). He has also been a member of the influential Washington-based financial advisory body, the Group of Thirty since 2003.

Contents 1 Early life 2 Career 3 References 4 External links

[edit] Early life

Feldstein was born in New York City and graduated from South Side High School in Rockville Centre, New York. He completed his undergraduate education at Harvard (B.A., Summa Cum Laude, 1961) and then attended Oxford University (B.Litt., 1963; D.Phil., 1967).

[edit] Career

In 1977, he received the John Bates Clark Medal of the American Economic Association, a prize awarded every two years to the economist under the age of 40 who is judged to have made the greatest contribution to economic science. He is among the 10 best economists in the world according to IDEAS/RePEc. He is the author of more than 300 research articles in economics and is known primarily for his work on macroeconomics and public finance. He has pioneered much of the research on the working mechanism and sustainability of public pension systems. Feldstein is an avid advocate of Social Security reform and has been a main driving force behind President George W. Bush's initiative of partial privatization of the Social Security system. Aside from his contributions to the field of public sector economics, he has also authored other important macroeconomics papers. One of his more well-known papers in this field was his influential investigation with Charles Horioka have investment behavior in countries. He and Horioka found that in the long run, capital tends to stay in its home country – that is to say, a nation's savings is used to fund its investment opportunities. This has since been known as the “Feldstein-Horioka puzzle”.

In 1997, writing about the upcoming European monetary union and the euro, Feldstein warned that the "adverse economic effects of a single currency on unemployment and inflation would outweigh any gains from facilitating trade and capital flows" and that, while "conceived of as a way of reducing the risk of another intra-European war", it was "more likely to have the opposite effect" and "lead to increased conflicts within Europe and between Europe and the United States".^[1]

In 2005, Feldstein was widely considered a leading candidate to succeed chairman Alan Greenspan as Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board. This was in part due to his prominence in the Reagan administration and his position as an economic advisor for the Bush presidential campaign. The New York Times wrote an editorial advocating that Bush choose either Feldstein or Ben Bernanke due to their credentials, and the week of the nomination The Economist predicted that the two men had the greatest probability of selection out of the field of candidates.^[2] Ultimately, the position went to Bernanke, possibly because Feldstein was a board member of AIG, which announced the same year that it would restate five years of past financial reports by $2.7 billion. Although Feldstein was not linked to the accounting practices in question, he had served as a Director of AIG since 1988, and the Harvard Crimson saw Bush as wanting to avoid a confirmation battle.^[3] In March 2007, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation announced that one of four 2007 Bradley Prizes to honor outstanding achievement will be awarded to Feldstein.link. On September 10, 2007, Feldstein announced that he would be stepping down as president of NBER effective June 2008. ^[4]

A well-known figure on the Harvard campus, Feldstein taught the introductory economics class "Social Analysis 10: Principles of Economics" (referred to as "Ec10" by Harvard students) for twenty years. Ec10 was routinely, and remains, the largest class at Harvard. He currently teaches courses in American economic policy and public sector economics at Harvard College.

Ultimately, Feldstein may have made one of his greatest impacts through the remarkable concentration of his students in top echelons of government and academia. These include: Larry Summers, former Harvard president and US Treasury secretary; David Ellwood, dean of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government; and James Poterba, MIT professor and member of Bush's tax reform advisory panel. Lawrence Lindsey, formerly Bush's top economic adviser, wrote his doctoral thesis under Feldstein, as did Harvey S. Rosen, the previous chairman of the president's Council of Economic Advisers, and Glenn Hubbard, Bush's first chairman of the council and now dean of the Columbia Business School.^[5]

Feldstein told in March 2008 he believes the United States are in a recession and it could be a severe one.^[6]

[edit] References

[edit] External links

• Webpage at Harvard
• Webpage at NBER
• Webpage at NNDB
• Feldstein's views on the U.S. dollar
• IDEAS/RePEc