In economics and political science, fiscal policy is the use of government revenue collection and expenditure to influence a country's economy. The use of government revenue expenditures to influence macroeconomic variables developed in reaction to the Great Depression of the 1930s, when the previous laissez-faire approach to economic management became unworkable. Fiscal policy is based on the theories of the British economist John Maynard Keynes, whose Keynesian economics theorised that government changes in the levels of taxation and government spending influence aggregate demand and the level of economic activity. Fiscal and monetary policy are the key strategies used by a country's government and central bank to advance its economic objectives. The combination of these policies enables these authorities to target inflation and to increase employment. In modern economies, inflation is conventionally considered "healthy" in the range of 2%–3%. Additionally, it is designed to try to keep GDP growth at 2%–3% and the unemployment rate near the natural unemployment rate of 4%–5%. This implies that fiscal policy is used to stabilise the economy over the course of the business cycle.
Rüdiger Dornbusch was a German economist who worked in the United States for most of his career.
David Kenneth Miles is a British economist. Born in Swansea, he has spent his working life in London, in teaching, business and the public sector. He is a professor at Imperial College London, and was Chief UK Economist of Morgan Stanley bank from October 2004 to May 2009. He was appointed to the Bank of England's interest-rate-setting Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) from 1 June 2009 to June 2012 and again from June 2012 to 31 August 2015, before being replaced by Gertjan Vlieghe. According to the Bank of England, "As an economist he has focused on the interaction between financial markets and the wider economy.". In December 2020 he was appointed to the main board of the central Bank of Ireland. He was appointed to the Budget Responsibility Committee of the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) in December 2021. He took up that role in January 2022.
Ricardo A. M. R. Reis is a Portuguese economist and the A. W. Phillips professor of economics at the London School of Economics. He has published widely on macroeconomics, including both monetary and fiscal policy, inflation and business cycles, and for these he won the 2021 Yrjö Jahnsson Foundation medal awarded every two years by the European Economic Association for best economist under the age of 45. He writes a weekly op-ed for the Portuguese newspaper Expresso.
Constantine Christos "Costas" Azariadis is a macroeconomist born in Athens, Greece. He has worked on numerous topics, such as labor markets, business cycles, and economic growth and development. Azariadis originated and developed implicit contract theory.
Kamer Daron Acemoğlu is a Turkish American economist of Armenian descent who has taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology since 1993, where he is currently the Elizabeth and James Killian Professor of Economics. He received the John Bates Clark Medal in 2005, and was named an Institute Professor at MIT in 2019.
Fabrizio Zilibotti is an Italian economist. He is the Tuntex Professor of International and Development Economics at Yale University. Zilibotti was previously professor of economics at University College London, the University of Zürich, and at the Institute for International Economic Studies in Stockholm.
The Barcelona School of Economics (BSE) is an internationally renowned institute for research and graduate education in economics, finance, data science, and the social sciences located in Barcelona, Spain.
Jordi Galí is a Spanish macroeconomist who is regarded as one of the main figures in New Keynesian macroeconomics today. He is currently the director of the Centre de Recerca en Economia Internacional at Universitat Pompeu Fabra and a Research Professor at the Barcelona Graduate School of Economics. After obtaining his doctorate from MIT in 1989 under the supervision of Olivier Blanchard, he held faculty positions at Columbia University and New York University before moving to Barcelona.
Wouter J. den Haan is a professor of economics at the London School of Economics, research fellow and programme director of the CEPR, and co-director of the Centre for Macroeconomics. Currently, his main areas of interest are business cycles, frictions in financial and labor markets, and numerical methods to solve models with a large number of heterogeneous agents.
Richard David Portes CBE is a professor of Economics and an Academic Director of the AQR Asset Management Institute at London Business School. He was President of the Centre for Economic Policy Research, which he founded. He also serves as Directeur d'Etudes at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris.
Simon H. Johnson is a British American economist. He is the Ronald A. Kurtz Professor of Entrepreneurship at the MIT Sloan School of Management and a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. He has held a wide variety of academic and policy-related positions, including professor of economics at Duke University's Fuqua School of Business. From March 2007 through the end of August 2008, he was Chief Economist of the International Monetary Fund.
Richard Andreas Werner is a German banking and development economist who is a university professor at University of Winchester.
David William Soskice, FBA is a British political economist and academic. He is currently the LSE School Professor of Political Science and Economics at the London School of Economics.
Albert Marcet Torrens is a Spanish economist, specialized in macroeconomics, time series, financial economics and economic dynamic theory. He is currently serving as Professor of Macroeconomics at the UCL Department of Economics, on leave from his position as ICREA Research Professor and Director of the Institute for Economic Analysis (IAE), a research centre of the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), and AXA Research Chair on Macroeconomic Risk at the Barcelona Graduate School of Economics. He is also a Fellow of the Econometric Society and he has been a Research Fellow of Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR) since 1992.
Simon Wren-Lewis is a British economist. He is a professor of economic policy at the Blavatnik School of Government at Oxford University and a Fellow of Merton College.
James Alan Robinson is a British economist and political scientist. He is currently the Reverend Dr. Richard L. Pearson Professor of Global Conflict Studies and University Professor at the Harris School of Public Policy, University of Chicago. He also serves as the Institute Director of The Pearson Institute for the Study and Resolution of Global Conflicts at the Harris School. Robinson has previously taught at Harvard University between 2004 and 2015 and also at the University of California, Berkeley, University of Southern California and the University of Melbourne.
Andrew Jonathan Hughes Hallett FRSE was a British economist. He was University Professor of Economics and Public Policy at George Mason University, Senior Research Fellow at Kings College and Honorary Professor of Economics at the University of St Andrews He was also a member of the Scottish Growth Commission.
Willi Semmler is a German born American economist who currently teaches at The New School in New York.
Melissa Dell is the Andrew E. Furer Professor of Economics at Harvard University. Her research interests include development economics, political economy, and economic history.
