Alan Blinder, Distinguished Fellow 2011

Alan Blinder is a distinguished macroeconomist whose career spans more than 40 years of research, teaching, textbook writing, public service, and service to the Association. His primary research area is monetary and fiscal policies, and his paper and book "Does fiscal policy matter?" (with Robert Solow), and papers "Credit, money and aggregate demand" and "The federal funds rate and channels of monetary transmission" (both with Ben Bernanke), are well known. He has also forayed into labor economics, and his 1973 paper on wage discrimination is very highly cited. He has also done some interesting research on decision-making in committees (with John Morgan), and on explanations of price-stickiness.

He has given two major lectures at the Association's annual meetings: the 1988 Ely Lecture, "The challenge of high unemployment," and the 1996 Distinguished Lecture on Economics in Government, "What central bankers could learn from academics, and vice versa."

His introductory textbook, "Economic Principles and Policy" (with William Baumol) was innovative in its sophistication, and has gone through eleven editions and multiple translations.

He served on the Council of Economic Advisers (1993-4), and was ViceChairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve (1994-6). He continues to write and speak in public policy forums on issues of monetary and fiscal policies, employment, and trade.

He served on the Association's Executive Committee (1985-7), and was VicePresident in 1989. He was President of the Eastern Economic Association in 2005, and has been elected to the American Philosophical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Academy of Political and Social Science.

Electing Blinder to a Distinguished Fellowship would be a fitting recognition of his long and valuable service to scholarship, to teaching, to public policy, and especially to the Association.