| Barry J. Eichengreen | |
| Website: | eml.berkeley.edu/~eichengr |
| Nationality: | American |
| Institution: | University of California, Berkeley |
| Field: | Political economics, economic history |
| Alma Mater: | A.B. (1974), University of California, Santa Cruz M.A. (1976), M.Phil. (1977), M.A. (1978), Ph.D. (1979) Yale University |
| Repec Prefix: | e |
| Repec Id: | pei2 |
Barry Julian Eichengreen (born 1952) is an American economist and economic historian who is the George C. Pardee and Helen N. Pardee Professor of Economics and Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley, where he has taught since 1987.[1] [2] Eichengreen is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and a research fellow at the Centre for Economic Policy Research.
Eichengreen's mother was Lucille Eichengreen, a Holocaust survivor and author.
Eichengreen has done research and published widely on the history and current operation of the international monetary and financial system. He received his A.B. from UC Santa Cruz in 1974. an M.A. in economics, an M.Phil. in economics, an M.A. in history, and a Ph.D. in economics from Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut.
He was a senior policy advisor to the International Monetary Fund in 1997 and 1998, although he has since been critical of the IMF. In 1997, he became a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
His best known work is the book Golden Fetters: The Gold Standard and the Great Depression, 1919–1939, Oxford University Press, 1992. In his own book on the Great Depression, Ben Bernanke summarized Eichengreen's thesis as follows:
The main evidence Eichengreen adduces in support of this view is the fact that countries that abandoned the gold standard earlier saw their economies recover more quickly.
His recent books include Global Imbalances and the Lessons of Bretton Woods (MIT Press 2006), The European Economy Since 1945 (Princeton University Press 2007), Exorbitant Privilege: The Rise and Fall of the Dollar and the Future of the International Monetary System (Oxford University Press 2011), The Populist Temptation: Economic Grievance and Political Reaction in the Modern Era (Oxford University Press 2018),[3] and In Defense of Public Debt (Oxford University Press 2021).
His most cited paper is Bayoumi and Eichengreen "Shocking Aspects of European Monetary Unification" (1993) which argued that the European Union was less suitable as a Single Currency Area than the United States. This diagnosis was confirmed in 2011 when external shocks caused the Eurozone Crisis.
He has been President of the Economic History Association (2010–2011). In addition to this, he is a non-resident Senior Fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation and a regular contributor to Project Syndicate since 2003. He was convener of the Bellagio Group from 2008-2020.