The Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) is a United States agency within the Executive Office of the President established in 1946, which advises the president of the United States on economic policy. The CEA provides much of the empirical research for the White House and prepares the publicly-available annual Economic Report of the President. The council is made up of its chairperson and generally two to three additional member economists. Its chairperson requires appointment and Senate confirmation, and its other members are appointed by the President.
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, and was named an Institute Professor at MIT in 2019. He received the John Bates Clark Medal in 2005, and the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2024.
Kristin J. Forbes is an American macroeconomist and policy adviser currently serving as the Jerome and Dorothy Lemelson Professor of Management and Global Economics at the MIT Sloan School of Management. She was formerly a member of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, and an external member of the Monetary Policy Committee of the Bank of England. Forbes' research focuses on international macroeconomics, monetary economics, and macroprudential policy. Alongside her academic appointments, she sits on advisory boards to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, International Monetary Fund, and Bank for International Settlements.
Austan Dean Goolsbee is an American economist and writer. He is the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. Goolsbee formerly served as the Robert P. Gwinn Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business. He was the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers from 2010 to 2011 and a member of President Barack Obama's cabinet. He served as a member of the Chicago Board of Education from 2018 to 2019.
Peter Kent Navarro is an American economist who served in the Trump administration, first as Deputy Assistant to the President and director of the short-lived White House National Trade Council, then as Assistant to the President, Director of Trade and Manufacturing Policy in the new Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy; he was also named the national Defense Production Act policy coordinator. He is a professor emeritus of economics and public policy at the Paul Merage School of Business, University of California, Irvine, and the author of Death by China, among other publications. Navarro ran unsuccessfully for office in San Diego, California, five times. Navarro, who sought to overturn the 2020 presidential election, was the first former White House official ever imprisoned on a contempt-of-Congress conviction.
George Jesus Borjas is a Cuban-American economist and the Robert W. Scrivner Professor of Economics and Social Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. He has been described as "America’s leading immigration economist" and "the leading sceptic of immigration among economists". Borjas has published a number of studies that conclude that low-skilled immigration adversely affects low-skilled natives, a proposition that is debated among economists.
Kevin Allen Hassett is an American economist who is a former Senior Advisor and Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers in the Trump administration from 2017 to 2019. He coauthored Dow 36,000, published in 1999, which argued that the stock market was about to have a massive swing upward and would reach 36,000 by 2004. Shortly thereafter, the dot-com bubble burst, causing a massive decline in stock market prices. The Dow did not reach 36,000 until late 2021.
Jared Bernstein is an American government official who is the chair of the United States Council of Economic Advisers. He is a senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. From 2009 to 2011, Bernstein was the chief economist and economic adviser to Vice President Joe Biden in the Obama administration. In 2008, Michael D. Shear described Bernstein as a progressive and "a strong advocate for workers".
Cecilia Elena Rouse is an American economist and the President of the Brookings Institution. She served as the 30th Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers between 2021 and 2023. She is the first Black American to hold this position. Prior to this, she served as the dean of the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. Joe Biden nominated Rouse to be Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers in November 2020. Rouse was overwhelmingly confirmed by the Senate on March 2, 2021, by a vote of 95–4. She resigned on March 31, 2023, to return to teaching. On June 28, she was named the 9th President of the Brookings Institution.
Adriana Debora Kugler is an American economist who serves as a member of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. She previously served as U.S. executive director at the World Bank, nominated by President Joe Biden and confirmed by the U.S. Senate in April 2022. She is a professor of public policy at Georgetown University's McCourt School of Public Policy and is currently on leave from her tenured position at Georgetown. She served as the Chief Economist to U.S. Labor Secretary Hilda L. Solis from September 6, 2011 to January 4, 2013.
Jonathan David Ostry is Professor of Economics, Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto, cross-appointed to the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy and the Department of Economics. Prior to his appointment to the University of Toronto faculty, Ostry served as Professor of the Practice in the Department of Economics at Georgetown University. Ostry is also a Research Fellow at the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR) in London, England, and a Non-Resident Research Fellow at Bruegel in Brussels. Prior to his academic appointments, Ostry served in senior roles for more than three decades at the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in Washington DC, including as Deputy Director of the Research Department and Acting Director of the Asia and Pacific Department.
Betsey Ayer Stevenson is an economist and Professor of Economics and Public Policy at the University of Michigan Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy. Additionally, she is a fellow of the Ifo Institute for Economic Research in Munich, a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and servers on the board of the American Economic Association. The Obama Administration announced her appointment as a Member of the Council of Economic Advisers, a post she served from 2013 through 2015. She previously served as Chief Economist of the U.S. Department of Labor under Secretary Hilda Solis from 2010 to 2011. Previously, she was an assistant professor of Business and Public Policy, at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.
Stephanie A Kelton is an American heterodox economist and academic, and a leading proponent of Modern Monetary Theory. She served as an advisor to Bernie Sanders's 2016 presidential campaign and worked for the Senate Budget Committee under his chairmanship. She is also the author of The Deficit Myth, a New York Times bestseller, on the subject of Modern Monetary Theory.
Diana Furchtgott-Roth is an American economist who is adjunct professor of economics at George Washington University and a columnist. She served as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Research and Technology at the United States Department of Transportation during the Trump administration. She previously served as Acting Assistant Secretary for Economic Policy at the U.S. Department of the Treasury.
Lisa DeNell Cook is an American economist who has served as a member of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors since May 23, 2022. She is the first African American woman and first woman of color to sit on the Board. Before her appointment to the Federal Reserve, she was elected to the board of directors of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago.
Claudia Rae Sahm is an American economist, currently serving as Chief Economist for New Century Advisors. She is also the founder of Sahm Consulting. Claudia was formerly director of macroeconomic policy at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, and a Section Chief at the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, where she worked in various capacities from 2007 to 2019. Sahm specializes in macroeconomics and household finance. She is best known for the development of the Sahm rule, a Federal Reserve Economic Data (FRED) indicator for identifying recessions in real-time.
Donald Jasper Harris, is a Jamaican-American economist and emeritus professor at Stanford University, known for applying post-Keynesian ideas to development economics. He was the first Black scholar granted tenure in the Stanford Department of Economics, and he is the father of Kamala Harris, the incumbent Vice President of the United States and 2024 Democratic presidential nominee, and of Maya Harris, a lawyer, advocate and writer.
After Piketty: The Agenda for Economics and Inequality is a 2017 collection of essays edited by the economists Heather Boushey, J. Bradford DeLong, and Marshall Steinbaum. The essays center on how to integrate inequality into economic thinking. Common themes are Thomas Piketty’s influence on academia and policy, the need for better wealth data, inequality in the United States, and the reasons for the process of wealth accumulation and rising inequality discussed by Piketty in his book Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2013). In the final entry, Piketty himself responds to the essays.
Ellora Derenoncourt is an American economist. She is an assistant professor of Economics in the Industrial Relations Section of the Department of Economics at Princeton University and a member of the Industrial Relations Section of Princeton Economics. She was previously at the Department of Economics and assistant professor of Public Policy at the Goldman School of Public Policy at UC Berkeley. Her work focuses on labor economics, economic history and the study of inequality. Her research on racial inequality in the United States has been featured on NPR, New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal.
Michelle Holder is an American economist who is an Associate Professor of Economics at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in the City University of New York. Her research focuses on the position of Black workers and women of color in the American labor market, including wage gaps based on race and gender as well as unemployment rate differences by race and gender. In June 2021, she was named president and CEO of The Washington Center for Equitable Growth. Holder stepped down in 2022 from the presidency and transitioned into the role of distinguished senior fellow with the organization through 2023.
