Michael Woodford (economist)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Michael Dean Woodford is an American macroeconomist who currently teaches at Columbia University. His early research topics included sunspot equilibria^[1] and imperfect competition^[2]. More recently he has studied many topics related to monetary policy, including the fiscal theory of the price level^[3], the effectiveness of monetary policy as consumers use more credit and less cash^[4], and inflation targeting rules^[5]. His research on monetary policy makes use of the microfounded New Keynesian macroeconomic model he developed with Julio Rotemberg^[6]. He is probably best known as the author of Interest and Prices: Foundations of a Theory of Monetary Policy^[7], which has, in the words of the Deutsche Bank Prize Committee, 'quickly become the standard reference for monetary theory and analysis among academic economists and their colleagues at central banks'.^[8]

[edit] Academic career

Woodford holds an undergraduate degree from the University of Chicago and a law degree from Yale, and completed his economics doctorate at MIT in 1983.^[9] He began his teaching career at Columbia, and then taught at Chicago and Princeton before returning to Columbia to accept the John Bates Clark chair in 2004. He is one of relatively few economists to have been awarded the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Prize Fellowship, which financed his research from 1981 to 1986. In 2007, he was awarded the Deutsche Bank Prize in Financial Economics.^[8]

[edit] References

1. ^ Woodford, Michael (1984), 'Learning to believe in sunspots'. Econometrica 58 (2), pp. 287-307.
2. ^ Rotemberg, Julio, and Michael Woodford (1995), 'Dynamic general equilibrium models with imperfectly competitive product markets'. Ch. 9 of Thomas Cooley, ed., Frontiers of Business Cycle Research, Princeton University Press, ISBN 069104323X.
3. ^ Woodford, Michael (2001), 'Fiscal requirements for price stability'. Journal of Money, Credit, and Banking 33, pp. 669-728.
4. ^ Woodford, Michael (1998), 'Doing without money: controlling inflation in a post-monetary world'. Review of Economic Dynamics 1, pp. 173-219.
5. ^ Woodford, Michael (2005), 'Optimal inflation targeting rules'. In Ben Bernanke and Michael Woodford, eds., Inflation targeting. University of Chicago Press.
6. ^ Rotemberg, Julio, and Michael Woodford (1997), 'An optimization-based econometric framework for the evaluation of monetary policy'. NBER Macroeconomics Annual 12, pp. 297-346.
7. ^ Woodford, Michael (2003), Interest and Prices: Foundations of a Theory of Monetary Policy. Princeton University Press, ISBN 0691010498.
8. ^ ^{a b} Michael Woodford: The Prize Winner 2007
9. ^ Woodford, Michael Dean (1983), Essays in Intertemporal Economics. Ph.D. dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.