George Perry (American economist)

Last updated
George L. Perry
Born1934 (age 8788)
Nationality United States
Institution The Brookings Institution
Alma mater MIT (Ph.D.)

George L. Perry is an American economist, currently a Senior Fellow emeritus at the Brookings Institution. [1] In 1970, he and Arthur Okun founded the Brookings Panel and its journal, the Brookings Papers on Economic Activity (BPEA). [2] They conceived the Panel as a way to apply rigorous economic research to current economic puzzles, problems and policy issues. After Okun's death in 1980, William Brainard replaced him and Brainard and Perry ran the Panel and edited BPEA until 2007.

Contents

In his own research, Perry specializes in labor markets, inflation, fiscal and monetary policy, financial markets, and economic forecasting. [2]

Life and career

George Perry was born in New York in 1934, and grew up in Los Angeles. He enrolled at The Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1950, and upon graduation served in the U.S. Air Force (1954-1957). After his service, George returned to MIT and received his Ph.D in economics in 1961. Perry served on the staff of the Council of Economic Advisors under President John F. Kennedy, and subsequently was on the economics faculty at the University of Minnesota, reaching the rank of full professor. In 1969 he returned to Washington to join The Brookings Institution as a Senior Fellow in Economic Studies. In addition to his work at the Brookings Institution, he is a Director Emeritus of various Dreyfus mutual funds and of the State Farm Mutual Automobile Association and State Farm Life Insurance Company.

Brookings Papers on Economic Activity

Soon after they both arrived at Brookings, George Perry and Arthur Okun founded the Brookings Panel and its Journal, the Brookings Papers on Economic Activity. They would run the Panel meetings and edit BPEA together until Okun's death in 1980. In the following year Perry enlisted William Brainard to replace Okun, and they ran and edited BPEA for the next 27 years.

When Perry and Brainard turned the Panel over to their chosen successors, Steven Pearlstein of The Washington Post commented:

"Twice a year since 1970, some of the best economists in the world gathered at the Brookings Institution to deliver and critique papers on all the hot topics in macroeconomics. The quality was always high and the disagreements were spirited but respectful, with none of the partisan or ideological rancor that now characterizes so much of economic conversation. But last week's meeting of the panel was special. Nearly 100 alumni, including a certain former Federal Reserve chairman and three Nobel prize winners, gathered to pay tribute to George Perry, a Brookings fixture, and Yale professor Bill Brainard, who have been the guiding hands and spirit of the panel for the past 27 years. It's only a slight exaggeration to say that there are few pieces of received wisdom in macroeconomics today that don't have Perry's and Brainard's fingerprints on them. And it tells you something about the institution they nourished that they will be succeeded by a trio of top-flight economists with deep Washington experience: former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers; Greg Mankiw, former head of President Bush's Council of Economic Advisers; and Doug Elmendorf, who's worked at the Treasury, Fed,Congress and the White House." [3]

Publications

Perry has published many research papers in the Brookings Papers on Economic Activity and in other professional journal including the American Economic Review and the National Tax Journal. In addition to his research papers, Perry has authored and edited numerous books including Unemployment, Money Wage Rates, and Inflation (MIT Press, 1996), Curing Chronic Inflation (Brookings, 1978), and Economic Events, Ideas, and Policies: The 1960s and After (Brookings, 2000). [1] [4]

Personal life

George Perry married the former Dina Axelrad in 1987, [5] and they live in Washington, D.C. He has three children by a previous marriage and three grandchildren. He is learning to play the cello.

Related Research Articles

James Tobin American economist (1918-2002)

James Tobin was an American economist who served on the Council of Economic Advisers and consulted with the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, and taught at Harvard and Yale Universities. He developed the ideas of Keynesian economics, and advocated government intervention to stabilize output and avoid recessions. His academic work included pioneering contributions to the study of investment, monetary and fiscal policy and financial markets. He also proposed an econometric model for censored dependent variables, the well-known tobit model.

Robert Lucas Jr. American economist

Robert Emerson Lucas Jr. is an American economist at the University of Chicago, where he is currently the John Dewey Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus in Economics and the College. Widely regarded as the central figure in the development of the new classical approach to macroeconomics, he received the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1995 "for having developed and applied the hypothesis of rational expectations, and thereby having transformed macroeconomic analysis and deepened our understanding of economic policy". He has been characterized by N. Gregory Mankiw as "the most influential macroeconomist of the last quarter of the 20th century." As of 2020, he ranks as the 11th most cited economist in the world.

George Akerlof American economist (born 1940)

George Arthur Akerlof is an American economist who is a university professor at the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University and Koshland Professor of Economics Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. He won the 2001 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.

John Harold Williamson was a British-born economist who coined the term Washington Consensus. He served as a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics from 1981 until his retirement in 2012. During that time, he was the project director for the United Nations High-Level Panel on Financing for Development in 2001. He was also on leave as chief economist for South Asia at the World Bank during 1996–99, adviser to the International Monetary Fund from 1972 to 1974, and an economic consultant to the UK Treasury from 1968 to 1970. He was also an economics professor at Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro (1978–81), University of Warwick (1970–77), Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of York (1963–68) and Princeton University (1962–63).

Janet Yellen 78th United States secretary of the treasury

Janet Louise Yellen is an American economist, educator and government official serving as the 78th United States secretary of the treasury since January 26, 2021. A member of the Democratic Party, she previously served as the 15th chair of the Federal Reserve from 2014 to 2018. Yellen is the first woman to hold either role. She is also a professor emerita at Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, and formerly a distinguished fellow in residence at the Brookings Institution.

J. Bradford DeLong American economist

James Bradford "Brad" DeLong is an economic historian who is a professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley. DeLong served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Department of the Treasury in the Clinton Administration under Lawrence Summers.

Arthur Melvin Okun American economist

Arthur Melvin "Art" Okun was an American economist. He served as the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers between 1968 and 1969. Before serving on the C.E.A., he was a professor at Yale University and, afterwards, was a fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. In 1968 he was elected as a Fellow of the American Statistical Association.

Robert Joseph Barro is an American macroeconomist and the Paul M. Warburg Professor of Economics at Harvard University. Barro is considered one of the founders of new classical macroeconomics, along with Robert Lucas, Jr. and Thomas J. Sargent. He is currently a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution and co-editor of the influential Quarterly Journal of Economics.

Charles Schultze American economist and government official

Charles Louis Schultze was an American economist and public policy analyst. He served as the Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers during the President Carter Administration. Schultze was appointed the Assistant Director of the Bureau of the Budget by President John F. Kennedy in 1962, and was the director from 1965 until 1968 during President Lyndon Johnson's Great Society agenda. He was also a veteran of World War II, during which he served in the army.

Christopher A. Sims American econometrician and macroeconomist

Christopher Albert Sims is an American econometrician and macroeconomist. He is currently the John J.F. Sherrerd '52 University Professor of Economics at Princeton University. Together with Thomas Sargent, he won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2011. The award cited their "empirical research on cause and effect in the macroeconomy".

NAIRU Level of unemployment below which inflation would be expected to rise

Non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment (NAIRU) is a theoretical level of unemployment below which inflation would be expected to rise. It was first introduced as NIRU by Franco Modigliani and Lucas Papademos in 1975, as an improvement over the "natural rate of unemployment" concept, which was proposed earlier by Milton Friedman.

The Brookings Papers on Economic Activity (BPEA) is a journal of macroeconomics published twice a year by the Brookings Institution Press.[1] Each issue of the journal comprises the proceedings of a conference held biannually by the Economic Studies program at the Brookings Institution in Washington D.C. The conference and journal both “emphasize innovative analysis that has an empirical orientation, take real-world institutions seriously, and is relevant to economic policy.”[2]

Douglas Elmendorf American economist

Douglas William Elmendorf is an American economist who is the dean and Don K. Price Professor of Public Policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government. He previously served as the Director of the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) from 2009 to 2015. He was a Brookings Institution senior fellow from 2007 to 2009, and briefly in 2015 following his time at the CBO, and was a director of the Hamilton Project at Brookings.

Adam Posen

Adam Simon Posen is an American economist and President of the Peterson Institute for International Economics. He became President of the Peterson Institute on January 1, 2013, having first joined PIIE in July 1997. Under his leadership, the Peterson Institute has been named the top think tank in international economics by the Prospect Think Tank Awards and in the UPenn Global Go To Think Tank Index.

C. Eugene Steuerle American economist, a Richard B (born 1946)

C. Eugene "Gene" Steuerle is an American economist, a Richard B. Fisher chair and Institute Fellow at the Urban Institute in Washington, DC, and a columnist under the title The Government We Deserve.

William C. "Bill" Brainard is an American economist. He is the Arthur Okun Professor Emeritus of Economics at Yale University, and he served as the provost of the university from 1981 to 1986. Brainard is the namesake of the William C. Brainard chair, which current Yale provost Ben Polak holds. Brainard earned both his economics M.A. (1959) and Ph.D. (1963) at Yale. He has been teaching at Yale since 1962.

Phillip Swagel Director of the Congressional Budget Office

Phillip Lee "Phill" Swagel is an American economist who is currently the director of the Congressional Budget Office. As Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy from 2006 to 2009, he played an important role in the Troubled Asset Relief Program that was part of the U.S. government's response to the financial crisis of 2007–08. He was recently a Professor in International Economics at the University of Maryland School of Public Policy, a non-resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, senior fellow at the Milken Institute, and co-chair of the Bipartisan Policy Center's Financial Regulatory Reform Initiative.

Sidney Lewis Jones is an American economist and former official in the United States federal government. Educated at Utah State University and Stanford University, he initially taught in universities until he was recruited to join the staff of the Council of Economic Advisers. From there he held a number of positions in and out of government, including senior roles in the Departments of Commerce and the Treasury. A Republican, he has held strong views during his career about controlling inflation and federal government spending but was nonetheless well regarded as an economist across the political spectrum.

Karen Dynan American economist

Karen Dynan is an American economist who is Professor of the Practice of Economics at Harvard University and a Non-resident Senior Fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. She previously served as the Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and Chief Economist of the United States Department of the Treasury, having been nominated to that position by President Barack Obama in August 2013 and confirmed by the U.S. Senate in June 2014. From 2009 to 2013, Dr. Dynan was the Vice President and Co-director of the Economic Studies program at the Brookings Institution. Prior to joining Brookings, she served on the staff of the Federal Reserve Board for 17 years. Dr. Dynan is an expert on macroeconomic policy, consumer behavior, household finance, and housing policy.

Stephanie Aaronson is an American economist. She received her PhD in economics from Columbia University. Aaronson currently serves as a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, where she holds the position of vice president and director of economic studies. She specializes in labor economics and her current research focuses on labor force participation in the United States. Her work has been published in academic journals, such as the American Economic Review. Her research has also been featured in prominent American news publications, including The New York Times and The Economist.

References

  1. 1 2 http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/experts/p/perryg/perryg_cv.pdf [ bare URL PDF ]
  2. 1 2 "George L. Perry". 2013-01-11.
  3. Washington Post, September 9, 2007, "Three Cheers for Two Economists"
  4. George L. Perry; James Tobin (1 December 2010). Economic Events, Ideas, and Policies: The 1960s and After. Brookings Institution Press. ISBN   978-0815713425.
  5. "George L. Perry Wed To Dina Needleman". The New York Times. 1987-11-23. ISSN   0362-4331 . Retrieved 2019-07-11.