Olivier Blanchard

‍Olivier Blanchard is Senior Fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, which he joined in 2015 as its first C. Fred Bergsten Senior Fellow, and Robert M. Solow Professor of Economics, Emeritus, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Between 2008 and 2015, he was Economic Counsellor and Director of the Research Department (Chief Economist) of the International Monetary Fund. He is currently a professor at the Paris School of Economics.

Blanchard is a macroeconomist whose research covers monetary and fiscal policy, speculative bubbles, labour markets and the determinants of unemployment, the economic transition of former communist countries and the nature of the Global Financial Crisis. He is the author of two widely used macroeconomics textbooks, one at the graduate level with Stanley Fischer and one at the undergraduate level, and has advised numerous governments and international organisations.

Blanchard joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1982 after teaching at Harvard University, and chaired the MIT Department of Economics from 1998 to 2003. He is a past editor of the Quarterly Journal of Economics and the NBER Macroeconomics Annual, founding editor of the American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, a Fellow and former Council member of the Econometric Society, past President of the American Economic Association and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Blanchard received his PhD in Economics from MIT in 1977.