Greg Mankiw

Mankiw was born in Trenton, New Jersey. His grandparents were all Ukrainians.[14][15][16][17] He grew up in Cranford, New Jersey, where he worked in Republican politics,[18] and graduated from the Pingry School in 1976.[19] In 1975, he studied astrophysics at the Summer Science Program.[20] He graduated from Princeton University summa cum laude in 1980 with a Bachelor of Arts in economics.[21] Mankiw completed a 72-page long senior thesis titled "Understanding Employment Fluctuation."[22] At Princeton, Mankiw was classmates with economist David Romer, who would later become a coauthor of his, and roommates with playwright Richard Greenberg.

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 to 1983, 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,[23] 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 is widely considered a New Keynesian economist, although at least one financial journalist says he resists such easy categorisation.[1] 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.[24] This paper was a building block for work by Olivier Blanchard and Nobuhiro Kiyotaki[25] on aggregate-demand externalities and for work by Laurence Ball and David Romer[26] on the interaction between real and nominal rigidities.

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.[27]

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.[28]

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).[29] 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.[30]

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.

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.[31] 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.[32]

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."[33]

When the first edition of the Principles book was published in 1997, The Economist magazine wrote,[34]

Mr. Mankiw has produced something long overdue: an accessible introduction to modern economics. By writing more in the style of a magazine than a stodgy textbook and explaining even complex ideas in an intuitive, concise way, he will leave few students bored or bewildered ... Most refreshing, though, is the book's even-handedness. Mr Mankiw seems to revel in setting out how different schools of thought have contributed to economists' current state of knowledge.

Since then, more than one million copies have been sold, and Mankiw has received an estimated $42 million in royalties from the book, which is priced at $280 per copy.[35]

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,[36] he said:

The enormous size of the mortgage-backed securities market means that any problems at the GSEs matter for the financial system as a whole. This risk is a systemic issue also because the debt obligations of the housing GSEs are widely held by other financial institutions. The importance of GSE debt in the portfolios of other financial entities means that even a small mistake in GSE risk management could have ripple effects throughout the financial system.

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

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.[37] He has become an influential figure in the blogosphere and online journalism since launching his eponymous blog. The blog,[6] originally designed to assist his Ec10 students, has gained a readership that extends far beyond students of introductory economics.[38] Subtitled "Random Observations for Students of Economics," it was ranked the number one economics blog by US economics professors in a 2011 survey.[39]

In November 2006, Mankiw became an official economic adviser to then-Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney's political action committee, Commonwealth PAC.[40] In 2007, he signed on as an economic adviser to Romney's presidential campaign.[41] He continued in that role during Romney's 2012 presidential bid.[42][43]

From 2012 to 2015, Mankiw served as chairman of the Harvard economics department.[44]

In February 2013, Mankiw publicly supported legal recognition for same-sex marriage in an amicus brief submitted to the U.S. Supreme Court.[45]

Mankiw is a trustee of the Urban Institute.[46] 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."[47]

• 2007: Mankiw was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.[69]
• 2009: Mankiw became president of the Eastern Economic Association, succeeding Joseph Stiglitz and followed by Paul Krugman.[70]
• 2011: A survey of economics professors named Mankiw their second favorite living economist under the age of 60, just after Paul Krugman and just before Daron Acemoglu.[71]
• 2012: The Princeton Review named Mankiw one of the 300 best professors in the nation.[72][73]
• 2014: Along with David Card, Mankiw was elected vice president of the American Economic Association.[74]
• 2017: The Council for Economic Education honored Mankiw with its Visionary Award.[75]
• 2019: Omicron Delta Epsilon, the international honor society for economics, awarded Mankiw the biennial John R. Commons Award.[76]

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.[77]

In addition, Mankiw is briefly mentioned in the novels Nineteen Minutes by Jodi Picoult [78] and The Female Persuasion by Meg Wolitzer.[79]

On February 18, 2019, Mankiw was mentioned in a clue on the television show Jeopardy!:[80] "N. Gregory Mankiw has penned texts on these 'large' and 'small' fields, relating to how governments spend & how you do."

Mankiw lives in Massachusetts with his wife Deborah, to whom he has been married since 1984.[81] They have three children, Catherine, Nicholas and Peter, and a dog, Tobin.

• N. Gregory Mankiw (1985). "Small Menu Costs and Large Business Cycles: A Macroeconomic Model of Monopoly". Quarterly Journal of Economics. 100 (2): 529–537. doi:10.2307/1885395. JSTOR 1885395.
• N. Gregory Mankiw; David Romer; David Weil (1992). "A Contribution to the Empirics of Economic Growth". Quarterly Journal of Economics. 107 (2): 407–437. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.335.6159. doi:10.2307/2118477. JSTOR 2118477. S2CID 1369978.
• N. Gregory Mankiw (1998). Principles of Economics (1st ed.). Fort Worth, Texas: Dryden Press. ISBN 978-0-03098238-5.
  • N. Gregory Mankiw (2006). Principles of Economics (4th ed.). South-Western College Pub. ISBN 978-0-324-22472-6.
  • N. Gregory Mankiw (2011). Principles of Economics (6th ed.). Cengage Learning. ISBN 978-0-538-45305-9.
• N. Gregory Mankiw (2010). Macroeconomics (7th ed.). Worth Publishers. ISBN 978-1-4292-1887-0.

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• Greg Mankiw's blog
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• I Can Afford Higher Taxes. But They’ll Make Me Work Less. by N. Gregory Mankiw, New York Times, 9 October 2010