Stephanie Kelton

Kelton studied Business Finance and Economics at the California State University, Sacramento, earning a B.S. and a B.A. in 1995. She received a Rotary scholarship to study Economics at the University of Cambridge, receiving her Master's degree in 1997. On a fellowship from Christ's College, Cambridge, Kelton then spent a year at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College. She obtained a Ph.D. in Economics from The New School for Social Research in 2001 with her dissertation, "Public Policy and Government Finance: A Comparative Analysis Under Different Monetary Systems."

Kelton is currently a Professor of Public Policy and Economics at Stony Brook University and was formerly the Chair of the Economics Department at the University of Missouri–Kansas City. She was a research scholar at the UMKC Center for Full Employment and Price Stability[7] and the Levy Economics Institute in upstate New York.[8]

Kelton is editor-in-chief of the New Economic Perspectives blog.[9]

On December 26, 2014, Kelton was designated as Chief Economist for the Democratic Minority Staff of the Senate Budget Committee, a post that she held in 2015 and early 2016, when she left that position to become an economic advisor to the Bernie Sanders campaign.[10]

On May 25, 2017, Stony Brook University announced that Kelton would join the university: "This fall as a professor in the forthcoming Center for the Study of Inequality and Social Justice."[11] Kelton joined the university at the same time as her husband Paul, who was appointed at Stony Brook as the first Robert David Lion Gardiner Chair in American History, at the College of Arts and Sciences.[11]

In 2019, Kelton was invited to be the Geoff Harcourt Visiting Professor at the University of Adelaide.[12]

Kelton's primary research interests include monetary theory, employment policy, history of economic monetary thought, social security, public finance, fiscal policy, financial accounting, international finance, and European monetary integration.[3][13] She has been a notable proponent of and researcher in Modern Monetary Theory, publishing several papers and editing books in the field,[14] and a supporter of the proposal for a Job Guarantee.

Kelton publishes formally as well as in the popular press and appears on mass media. She has been a frequent guest on television and radio, including MSNBC's Up with Chris Hayes[15] and NPR's On Point.[16] Kelton has had opinion pieces published in the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times. How We Think About the Deficit Is Mostly Wrong appeared in The New York Times.[17] Kelton wrote the article, Congress can give every American a pony (if it breeds enough ponies), which appeared in The Los Angeles Times.[18]

Her book, The Deficit Myth,[19] appeared on the New York Times bestseller list for nonfiction in June 2020.[20] In an article published in the Wall Street Journal, Stanford economist John H. Cochrane gave the book a negative review,[21] saying that her "implications don’t lead to her desired conclusions [...] her logic, facts and language turn into pretzels". Cochrane asserted that Kelton's historical analysis of inflation was biased,[21] and that the book cited "no articles in major peer-reviewed journals, monographs with explicit models and evidence, or any of the other trappings of economic discourse".[21] New York University economist Alberto Bisin gave the book a negative review, saying "it’s not that the public-spending agenda proposed in the book wouldn’t be worthwhile, or that monetization is never a useful tool of monetary policy... These are all issues currently studied and debated in (mainstream) academic and policy circles. But MMT, as exposed in the book, appears to be a very poor attempt at supporting this political agenda, with no coherent theoretical support."[22]

Former ECB Chief Economist, Otmar Issing, gave the book a negative review in an article criticizing MMT.[23]

Marxist economist, Hans G. Despain,[24] gave the book a positive review.[25]

• Bell (Kelton), Stephanie, "Can Taxes and Bonds Finance Government Spending?", Levy Economics Institute, July 1998
• Bell (Kelton), Stephanie, "The role of the state and the hierarchy of money", Cambridge Journal of Economics, Vol. 25, 2001, pp. 149–163
• Kelton, Stephanie, Edward J. Nell, editors. The State, the Market, and the Euro: Metallism versus Chartalism in the Theory of Money; Edward Elgar; Reprint edition: May 2003; ISBN 9781843761563
• Kelton, Stephanie, The Deficit Myth, June 2020; ISBN 9781541736184

• History of economic thought
• Post-Keynesian economics

• Official website