Early Life and Education
Yared was born in Beirut during the Lebanese Civil War and raised in Cleveland,Ohio,where he attended University School. [6] [7] [8] His father,Jean-Pierre Yared,is the Director of the Center for Critical Care Medicine in the Heart and Vascular Institute and a staff anesthesiologist in the Anesthesiology Institute at the Cleveland Clinic. His mother,Sana Yared,is a French teacher and docent at the Cleveland Museum of Art. [8]
Yared earned a Bachelor of Arts in economics from Harvard University in 2001 and a Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2007. [9]
Academic career
Yared joined the faculty of Columbia Business School in 2007 as an assistant professor. [10]
In 2015,he became co-director of the Richman Center for Business,Law,and Public Policy,a position which he continues to hold. He was named the Mitsubishi UFJ Trust and Banking (MUTB) Professor of International Business in 2019. [10]
Yared has also held senior administrative roles at the school,including Vice Dean for Executive Education and Senior Vice Dean for Faculty Affairs. [1]
He is the co-author of Intermediate Macroeconomics (2021) with Nicolas Vincent,external Deputy Governor of the Bank of Canada and professor of economics in the Department of Applied Economics at HEC Montréal. [11]
Yared has held editorial positions at several peer-reviewed journals. He worked as an Associate Editor of the American Economic Review (2018–2024),Journal of Monetary Economics (2018–2020),International Economic Review (2013–2018),and Journal of the European Economic Association (2010–2016),and as a Foreign Editor of the Review of Economic Studies (2014–2020). [12] [13]
Research focus
Yared's research spans three main trajectories in macroeconomics:government debt and fiscal policy,the international role of the U.S. dollar and military power,and central banking and inflation. His academic work is closely aligned with his public commentary and policy engagement,particularly on the subject of U.S. fiscal sustainability.
Government Debt and Fiscal Policy
Yared has written extensively on the political economy of fiscal policy. In his 2019 article “Rising Government Debt:Causes and Solutions for a Decades-Old Trend,”he examined the growth of public debt in advanced economies since the 1980s,arguing that it stems from rising government spending. [14] [15] In the United States,he identified the expansion of entitlement programs,such as Medicare and Social Security,as the primary driver of debt growth,rather than tax cuts,and he noted similar patterns in other advanced economies. Yared argued that normative macroeconomic theories cannot explain these patterns. He linked these patterns to demographic and political forces,resulting in rising political polarization and electoral uncertainty,which makes spending restraint more difficult.
Yared has also argued that mounting debt inhibits the United States’ability to respond to global crises,potentially undermining the dollar's reserve currency status and posing significant long-term risks to global leadership. [16] [17] He has advocated for gradual reforms that simultaneously incorporate entitlement restructuring and broadening the tax base,citing Sweden's fiscal adjustment in the 1990s as an example. [16]
He has written about the solutions to these mounting debt problems in a series of papers that he co-authored with Yale professor and economist Marina Halac. These articles examine how fiscal rules function under political and informational constraints. Their 2014 study modeled how economic shocks erode governments' adherence to fiscal rules, [18] while later work examined optimal fiscal rules with threshold-based penalties under limited enforcement. [17] Their research emphasizes the time-inconsistency in government policymaking and the need for fiscal rules that restrict policymakers,analyzing the tradeoff between commitment to not overspend and flexibility to react to shocks.
Yared's positions contrasts with other economists,including Olivier Blanchard,Jason Furman,and Lawrence Summers,who suggested that concerns about debt growth were overblown in the pre-pandemic low-interest rate environment. [19]
Dollar and military dominance
In a 2024 article,Yared presented a game-theoretic framework that he has developed with University of Chicago professor Carolin Pflueger,which shows that military power and the financial privilege of a dominant currency reinforce one another. [20] [21] The model demonstrates that militarily dominant countries benefit from a funding advantage in the form of lower government bond yields,which helps those hegemonic countries to sustain their power advantage and win wars. [22] In the case of the United States,its military strength reassures investors about asset safety,supporting the dollar's reserve currency status and enabling lower borrowing costs. In turn,the U.S. financial dominance allows for a more efficient defense financing. The authors argued that this dynamic contributes to the U.S.'s exorbitant privilege in the global market. [23] However,they also warned of the system's fragility,noting that rising debt,fiscal gridlock,or alternative reserve currencies could weaken the U.S. position.
Yared connected this analysis to broader fiscal policy concerns,arguing that debt sustainability affects national security. [16] He has warned that persistent deficits could constrain the government's ability to respond to global threats and has advocated for fiscal reforms to preserve economic and strategic leadership.
Inflation and Central Banking
In a 2024 Brookings study co-authored with Hassan Afrouzi,Marina Halac,and Kenneth Rogoff,Yared examined how evolving economic and political conditions increase the difficulty of sustaining low and stable inflation. [24] The authors argued that the disinflationary environment of the late 20th and early 21st centuries was supported by structural forces associated with the Washington Consensus,such as globalization,market liberalization,de-unionization,and fiscal restraint,combined with reforms that enhanced central bank independence and inflation targeting. [24] These factors contributed to low inflation levels by the mid-2010s,just before inflation spiked in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. [24] The authors are of the view that the political economy environment in which central banks operate has changed markedly after the pandemic.
As structural trends reverse toward de-globalization,industrial policy,and higher defense budgets,the study contends that central banks face renewed political pressure from elected officials to prioritize employment and fiscal expansion over price stability. [25] [26] The authors used a dynamic New Keynesian model to analyze these mechanisms,incorporating political economy frictions. [24] The model demonstrates how inflationary biases can re-emerge even when central banks maintain formal independence.
The paper challenges a prevailing view among economists that inflation will eventually return and stay at lower central bank targets —around 2 percent in advanced economies,somewhat higher in emerging ones. [27] [28] It also warns that political constraints may lead to greater inflation volatility in the coming years. [26]
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