Robert J. Barro

About

Robert J. Barro is the Paul M. Warburg Professor of Economics at Harvard University and a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. He is coeditor of Harvard’s Quarterly Journal of Economics; coauthor, with Xavier Sala-i-Martin, of Economic Growth (2nd ed. 2004); and coauthor, with Rachel McCleary, of The Wealth of Religions: The Political Economy of Believing and Belonging (2019).

Economic Growth summarizes one area of Barro’s research, covering the determinants of economic growth across countries. A central element of the empirical framework is conditional convergence, whereby a country’s growth rate of per capita GDP is higher the further its distance from its own long-run position.

Another area of research concerns the impact of rare disasters on asset markets and macroeconomic activity, with applications to quantities of safe assets and pricing of stock options. The rare disaster associated with the coronavirus pandemic was used to assess the role of fiscal expansions in the recent surges of inflation in thirty-seven member countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.

Earlier research considered effects from public debt and budget deficits. Papers from the 1970s are the foundations for two basic concepts in macroeconomics: Ricardian equivalence and tax-rate smoothing.

Barro was previously president of the Western Economic Association, vice president of the American Economic Association, a viewpoint columnist for Business Week, and a contributing editor of the Wall Street Journal. Barro has been at the economics department at Harvard since 1987 and previously held positions at the University of Chicago, the University of Rochester, and Brown University.

He has a PhD in economics from Harvard University and a BS in physics from Caltech.