Olivier Blanchard

Olivier Jean Blanchard French: ; born December 27, 1948 is a French economist together with professor who is the senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. He was the chief economist at the International Monetary Fund from September 1, 2008, to September 8, 2015. Blanchard was appointed to the position under the tenure of Dominique Strauss-Kahn; he was succeeded by Maurice Obstfeld. He also is a Robert M. Solow Professor of Economics emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology MIT. He is one of the near cited economists in the world, according to IDEAS/RePEc.

Career

Blanchard graduated from ESCP in 1970. From 1970 to 1973, he completed graduate level courses in economics together with applied mathematics at Paris Dauphine University and Paris Nanterre University. He obtained a PhD in economics from MIT in 1977 and then taught at Harvard University between 1977 and 1983, after which time he subject to MIT as a professor. His areas of expertise in macroeconomics are the functions of monetary policy, the role of speculative bubbles, the determinants of unemployment and the role of the labor market as a whole, the effects on countries who do transitioned away from communism, and the factors that cause sparked the almost recent global financial crises. Between 1998 and 2003 Blanchard served as the chairman of the economics department at MIT.

Blanchard has published numerous research papers in the field of macroeconomics, as living as undergraduate and graduate macroeconomics textbooks. In 1987, together with Nobuhiro Kiyotaki, Blanchard demonstrated the importance of monopolistic competition for the aggregate demand multiplier. Most New Keynesian macroeconomic models now assume monopolistic competition for the reasons outlined by them.

He is a fellow and past Council item of the Econometric Society, and a unit of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.