Paul Schmelzing

About

Paul Schmelzing is an assistant professor of finance at Boston College. His research concentrates on current financial and macroeconomic topics within a long-run historical perspective, often deploying new archival financial sources. Areas include asset pricing, banking, and financial economics. On the first, he is currently writing a book under contract with Yale University Press, reconstructing global real interest rates and capital market trends since the Renaissance. On banking, he is the coauthor, together with Andrew Metrick, of the new Metrick-Schmelzing database on banking-crisis interventions, 1257–2020; this new resource proposes a new crisis-intervention classification and documents almost two thousand emergency policy responses during financial stress episodes over seven centuries. In the area of financial economics, he is currently researching long-run empirical dynamics in monetary economics and central bank balance sheets.

Schmelzing holds a PhD in history from Harvard (2019) and a BSc in economic history from the London School of Economics (2013). He was previously a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution (2017–19), was a research assistant for Kenneth Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart, and since 2016 has also been a visiting researcher at the Bank of England. Outside academia, he has gained a variety of professional experiences in finance and financial policy.