Michael Dean Woodford (born 1955) is an American

macroeconomist Macroeconomics (from the Greek prefix ''makro-'' meaning "large" + ''economics'') is a branch of economics dealing with performance, structure, behavior, and decision-making of an economy as a whole. For example, using interest rates, taxes, a ...

and monetary theorist who currently teaches at

Columbia University Columbia University (also known as Columbia, and officially as Columbia University in the City of New York) is a private research university in New York City. Established in 1754 as King's College on the grounds of Trinity Church in Manhatt ...

Academic career

Woodford holds

B.A Bachelor of arts (BA or AB; from the Latin ', ', or ') is a bachelor's degree awarded for an undergraduate program in the arts, or, in some cases, other disciplines. A Bachelor of Arts degree course is generally completed in three or four years ...

. from the

University of Chicago The University of Chicago (UChicago, Chicago, U of C, or UChi) is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois. Its main campus is located in Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood. The University of Chicago is consistently ranked among the b ...

(1977) and a J.D. from

Yale Law School Yale Law School (Yale Law or YLS) is the law school of Yale University, a private research university in New Haven, Connecticut. It was established in 1824 and has been ranked as the best law school in the United States by '' U.S. News & World ...

(1980). He completed his Ph.D. in economics at MIT in 1983. He began his teaching career at

Columbia Columbia may refer to: * Columbia (personification), the historical female national personification of the United States, and a poetic name for America Places North America Natural features * Columbia Plateau, a geologic and geographic region i ...

, and then taught at

Chicago (''City in a Garden''); I Will , image_map = , map_caption = Interactive Map of Chicago , coordinates = , coordinates_footnotes = , subdivision_type = List of sovereign states, Count ...

and

Princeton Princeton University is a private research university in Princeton, New Jersey. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and one of the nin ...

before returning to Columbia to accept the

John Bates Clark John Bates Clark (January 26, 1847 – March 21, 1938) was an American neoclassical economist. He was one of the pioneers of the marginalist revolution and opponent to the Institutionalist school of economics, and spent most of his career as ...

chair in 2004. He was awarded the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Prize Fellowship, which financed his research from 1981 to 1986. In 2007, he was awarded the

Deutsche Bank Prize The Deutsche Bank Prize in Financial Economics honors renowned researchers who have made influential contributions to the fields of finance and money and macroeconomics, and whose work has led to practical and policy-relevant results.

Theoretical contributions

Woodford's early research topics included sunspot equilibria, and imperfect competition. Thereafter he began to work on macroeconomic models with sticky prices; together with Julio Rotemberg he developed one of the first

microfounded Microfoundations are an effort to understand macroeconomic phenomena in terms of economic agents' behaviors and their interactions.Maarten Janssen (2008),Microfoundations, in ''The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics'', 2nd ed. Research in microf ...

New Keynesian New Keynesian economics is a school of macroeconomics that strives to provide microeconomic foundations for Keynesian economics. It developed partly as a response to criticisms of Keynesian macroeconomics by adherents of new classical macroec ...

macroeconomic model A macroeconomic model is an analytical tool designed to describe the operation of the problems of economy of a country or a region. These models are usually designed to examine the comparative statics and dynamics of aggregate quantities such a ...

s. Since then he has used this framework to study many topics related to

monetary policy Monetary policy is the policy adopted by the monetary authority of a nation to control either the interest rate payable for federal funds, very short-term borrowing (borrowing by banks from each other to meet their short-term needs) or the money s ...

, including the fiscal theory of the price level, the effectiveness of monetary policy as consumers use more credit and less cash, and inflation targeting rules. Michael Woodford has especially praised

Knut Wicksell Johan Gustaf Knut Wicksell (December 20, 1851 – May 3, 1926) was a leading Swedish economist of the Stockholm school. His economic contributions would influence both the Keynesian and Austrian schools of economic thought. He was married to t ...

's advocacy of using the interest rate to maintain price stability, noting that this was a remarkable insight at a time when most monetary policy was based on the gold standard (Woodford, 2003, p. 32). Woodford calls his own framework 'neo-Wicksellian', and he titled his textbook on monetary policy in homage to Wicksell's work.

''Interest and Prices''

Woodford is probably best known as the author of an advanced textbook on monetary macroeconomics entitled ''Interest and Prices: Foundations of a Theory of Monetary Policy''. The book has, in the words of the Deutsche Bank Prize Committee, "quickly become the standard reference for monetary theory and analysis among academic economists and their colleagues at central banks." The title ''Interest and Prices'' is a direct translation of ''Geldzins und Güterpreise'' the title of a book published by Wicksell in German 1898 and translated into English 1923.

References

External links

Michael Woodford's homepage at Columbia University

Michael Woodford 2007 winner
of the

Deutsche Bank Prize in Financial Economics The Deutsche Bank Prize in Financial Economics honors renowned researchers who have made influential contributions to the fields of finance and money and macroeconomics, and whose work has led to practical and policy-relevant results.

{{DEFAULTSORT:Woodford, Michael Dean 1955 births Living people People from Chicopee, Massachusetts Monetary economists Columbia University faculty MacArthur Fellows MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences alumni Princeton University faculty University of Chicago alumni University of Chicago faculty Yale Law School alumni Fellows of the Econometric Society New Keynesian economists Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 20th-century American economists 21st-century American economists