Olivier Blanchard

Olivier Blanchard served as chief economist of the International Monetary Fund from 2008 to 2015, guiding the institution through the global financial crisis and European debt crisis. His research on fiscal multipliers — showing they were larger than previously estimated during downturns — influenced austerity debates globally. He is the author of widely-used macroeconomics textbooks and has published influential research on hysteresis, unemployment, and the output gap. After the IMF, he moved to the Peterson Institute where he continues to contribute to macroeconomic policy debates. His 2019 presidential address to the American Economic Association — arguing that the costs of high public debt are lower when the interest rate on government debt is persistently below the economic growth rate — sparked a major re-evaluation of the conventional fiscal orthodoxy, with significant implications for how governments and international institutions think about the appropriate level of public investment and deficit financing.