Greg Mankiw

Mankiw has written widely on economics and economic policy. As of February 2020, the RePEc overall ranking based on academic publications, citations, and related metrics put him as the 45th most influential economist in the world, out of nearly 50,000 registered authors. He was the 11th most cited economist and the 9th most productive research economist as measured by the h-index. In addition, Mankiw is the author of several best-selling textbooks, writes a popular blog, and since 2007 has written a column, approximately monthly, for the Sunday business section of The New York Times. According to the Open Syllabus Project, Mankiw is the most frequently cited author on college syllabi for economics courses.

On October 28, 2019, Mankiw left the Republican Party and registered as an independent, citing his disappointment in the party's overlooking of President Trump's misdeeds and a wish to vote in either primary in his state of Massachusetts.

On February 18, 2019, Mankiw was mentioned in a clue on the television show Jeopardy!: "N. Gregory Mankiw has penned texts on these 'large' and 'small' fields, relating to how governments spend & how you do."

Mankiw is a trustee of the Urban Institute. In 2016 he became a member of the US Partnership on Mobility from Poverty, an effort funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and run by the Urban Institute. The group of 24 scholars and activists is "a new collaborative aimed at discovering permanent ladders of mobility for the poor. The partnership will identify breakthrough solutions that can be put into action by philanthropy, practitioners, and the public and private sectors."

In August 2016, Mankiw expressed opposition to the election of Donald Trump to the presidency. On his blog, he wrote:

Throughout his career, Mankiw has advocated the implementation of Pigovian taxes, such as a revenue-neutral carbon tax, to correct for externalities. Toward that end, on his blog he founded the informal Pigou Club. In 2016, he had a part in the Leonardo DiCaprio film Before the Flood, a documentary about global climate change, where he was interviewed about carbon taxation. In 2017, Mankiw was one of eight "Republican elder statesmen" proposing that conservatives embrace of a policy of carbon taxes, with all revenue rebated as lump-sum dividends; the group also included James A. Baker III, Martin S. Feldstein, Henry M. Paulson Jr., and George P. Shultz.

we found a course that espouses a specific—and limited—view of economics that we believe perpetuates problematic and inefficient systems of economic inequality in our society today ... Economics 10 makes it difficult for subsequent economics courses to teach effectively as it offers only one heavily skewed perspective rather than a solid grounding on which other courses can expand. ... Harvard graduates play major roles in the financial institutions and in shaping public policy around the world. If Harvard fails to equip its students with a broad and critical understanding of economics, their actions are likely to harm the global financial system. The last five years of economic turmoil have been proof enough of this.

In February 2013, Mankiw publicly supported legal recognition for same-sex marriage in an amicus brief submitted to the U.S. Supreme Court.

From 2012 to 2015, Mankiw served as chairman of the Harvard economics department.

After leaving the CEA, Mankiw resumed teaching at Harvard, taking over one of the most popular classes at Harvard College, the introductory economics course Ec 10, from Martin Feldstein. He has become an influential figure in the blogosphere and online journalism since launching his eponymous blog. The blog, originally designed to assist his Ec10 students, has gained a readership that extends far beyond students of introductory economics. Subtitled "Random Observations for Students of Economics," it was ranked the number one economics blog by US economics professors in a 2011 survey.

On November 2, 2011, a number of students in Mankiw's Economics 10 class walked out of his lecture. Several dozen of the 750 students participated. Before leaving, they handed Mankiw an open letter critical of his course, saying in part:

Mankiw is referenced in the 2011 film Elles, which shows an episode in the life of Anne (Juliette Binoche), a journalist writing an article about female student prostitution. When asked about her classes, one of the students, Polish immigrant Alicja (Joanna Kulig), replies that she has been studying neoliberal economist Greg Mankiw.

The proposed regulatory reforms were not passed into law until years later, when the financial crisis of 2007–2008 was well underway.

In November 2006, Mankiw became an official economic adviser to then-Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney's political action committee, Commonwealth PAC. In 2007, he signed on as an economic adviser to Romney's presidential campaign. He continued in that role during Romney's 2012 presidential bid.

Several controversies arose from CEA's February 2004 Economic Report of the President. In a press conference, Mankiw spoke of the gains from free trade, noting that outsourcing of jobs by U.S. companies is "probably a plus for the economy in the long run." While this reflected mainstream economic analysis, it was criticized by many politicians who drew a link between outsourcing and the still-slow recovery of the U.S. labor market in early 2004.

Mankiw is a conservative and has been an economic adviser to several Republican politicians. From 2003 to 2005, Mankiw was Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under President George W. Bush. In 2006, he became an economic adviser to Mitt Romney, and worked with Romney during his presidential campaigns in 2008 and 2012. On October 2019, he announced he was no longer a Republican due to his critics to President Trump and the Republican Party.

A related 2003 article by Mankiw, Reis, and Justin Wolfers analyzed data on inflation expectations, documenting substantial disagreement among both consumers and professional economists about expected future inflation. This disagreement is shown to vary over time, moving with inflation, the absolute value of the change in inflation, and relative price variability. The paper argues that a satisfactory model of economic dynamics must address these business-cycle moments. Noting that most macroeconomic models do not endogenously generate disagreement, they show that a sticky-information model broadly matches many of these facts. The model is also consistent with other observed departures of inflation expectations from full rationality, including auto-correlated forecast errors and insufficient sensitivity to recent macroeconomic news.

In May 2003, President George W. Bush appointed Mankiw as Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers. Mankiw served in that post from 2003 to 2005, followed by Harvey S. Rosen and then Ben Bernanke. While CEA chair, Mankiw was part of a Bush administration effort seeking greater oversight of the government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs), Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. In a November 2003 speech to a conference of bank supervisors, he said:

In 2002, Mankiw and Ricardo Reis proposed an alternative to the widely used New Keynesian Phillips curve, based on the slow diffusion of information among the population of price setters. Their sticky-information model displays three related properties that are more consistent with accepted views about the effects of monetary policy. First, disinflations are always contractionary (although announced disinflations are less contractionary than surprise ones). Second, monetary policy shocks have their maximum impact on inflation with a substantial delay. Third, the change in inflation is positively correlated with the level of economic activity.

When the first edition of the Principles book was published in 1997, The Economist magazine wrote,

Mankiw has written two popular college-level textbooks: the intermediate-level Macroeconomics (now in its 10th edition, published by Worth Publishers) and the more famous introductory text Principles of Economics (now in its 9th edition, published by Cengage). Subsets of chapters from the latter book are sold under the titles Principles of Microeconomics, Principles of Macroeconomics, Brief Principles of Macroeconomics, and Essentials of Economics. This book was signed for a record advance. The New York Times reported in 1995 that Mankiw "was offered a $1.4 million advance by Harcourt Brace in Fort Worth to write a basic economics textbook. That's about three times as big as any other in the college textbook market and rivals those of all but a few celebrity authors."

Mankiw's most widely cited paper is "A Contribution to the Empirics of Economic Growth," coauthored with David Romer and David Weil and published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics in 1992. The paper argues that the Solow growth model, once augmented to include a role for human capital, does a reasonably good job of explaining international differences in standards of living. According to Google Scholar, it has been cited more than 15,000 times, making it one of the most cited articles in the field of economics.

Mankiw has also written several papers on the empirical analysis of consumer behavior, often emphasizing the role of heterogeneity. An article coauthored with John Campbell in 1989 found that the aggregate consumption data are best described by a model in which about half of consumers obey the permanent income hypothesis and half simply consume their current income (sometimes called hand-to-mouth behavior). An article coauthored with Stephen Zeldes in 1991 found that the consumption of stockholders covaried more strongly with the stock market than the consumption of nonstockholders does, providing a possible explanation for the equity premium puzzle.

Beyond his work in macroeconomics, Mankiw has also written several other notable papers. In 1989, he coauthored a paper with David Weil examining the demographic determinants of housing demand and predicting that the aging of the baby boomers would undermine the housing market in the 1990s and 2000s. In 1986, he coauthored a paper with Michael Whinston in microeconomic theory showing that, under imperfect competition, entry tends to be excessive in homogeneous goods industries because entrants fail to take into account the business-stealing externality they impose on their rivals; when goods are heterogeneous, it is ambiguous whether free entry produces too many or too few firms because of offsetting business-stealing and product-variety externalities.

Mankiw is widely considered a New Keynesian economist, although at least one financial journalist says he resists such easy categorisation. Mankiw did important work on menu costs, which are a source of price stickiness. His paper "Small Menu Costs and Large Business Cycles: A Macroeconomic Model of Monopoly," published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics in 1985, compared a firm's private incentive to adjust prices after a shock to nominal aggregate demand with the social welfare implications of that decision. The paper concluded that expansion in aggregate demand may either increase welfare or reduce it, but the welfare reduction is never greater than the menu cost. A contraction in aggregate demand, however, reduces welfare, possibly in an amount much larger than the menu cost. Put another way, from a social planner's point of view, prices may be stuck too high, but never too low. This paper was a building block for work by Olivier Blanchard and Nobuhiro Kiyotaki on aggregate-demand externalities and for work by Laurence Ball and David Romer on the interaction between real and nominal rigidities.

Mankiw lives in Massachusetts with his wife Deborah, to whom he has been married since 1984. They have three children, Catherine, Nicholas and Peter, and a dog, Tobin.

After college, Mankiw spent a year working on his Doctor of Philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a subsequent year studying at Harvard Law School. He worked as a staff economist for the Council of Economic Advisers from 1982–83, foreshadowing his later position as Chairman of that organization. After leaving the Council, he earned his PhD in economics from MIT in 1984 under the supervision of Stanley Fischer. He returned to Harvard Law for a year but, having completed his PhD and realizing he was better at economics, he left to teach at MIT for a year and then became an assistant professor of economics at Harvard University in 1985. He was promoted to full professor in 1987 at the age of 29.

Mankiw was born in Trenton, New Jersey. His grandparents were all Ukrainians. He grew up in Cranford, New Jersey, where he worked in Republican politics, and graduated from the Pingry School in 1976. In 1975, he studied astrophysics at the Summer Science Program. He graduated from Princeton University summa cum laude in 1980 with a Bachelor of Arts in economics. Mankiw completed a 72-page long senior thesis titled "Understanding Employment Fluctuation." At Princeton, Mankiw was classmates with economist David Romer, who would later become a coauthor of his, and roommates with playwright Richard Greenberg.

Nicholas Gregory Mankiw (/ˈ m æ n k j uː / ; born February 3, 1958) is an American macroeconomist who is currently the Robert M. Beren Professor of Economics at Harvard University. Mankiw is best known in academia for his work on New Keynesian economics.