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Robert Barro (1944 - )



Influential conservative macroeconomist, Paul M.
Warburg Professor of Economics at Harvard
University.

Dr. Barro first reached wide notice with a 1974
paper entitled "Are Government Bonds Net Wealth?",
a paper which argued that, under certain
assumptions, present borrowing would be matched by
increased lending in order to pay future taxes
expected to pay the debt on the government bonds.
This paper was direct response to the
Blinder-Solow results, which had implied that the
long term implications of government borrowing
would be compensated for by the wealth effect.
This paper is among the most cited in
macro-economics, and its implications of his
Ricardan Equivalence Hypothesis are still being
debated in the present. In a strange twist, many
neo-Keynesians now argue for fiscal restraint,
while REH implies that it is possible for
government debt to "crowd in" private investment,
rather than "crowd out" as Blinder-Solow's results
maintain.

In 1976, he authored a second influential paper,
"Rational expectations and the role of monetary
policy", on the topic of Monetary policy and
rational expectations. In it he argued that
information asymmetries would cause real effects
as rational economic actors in response to
uncertainty, but not in response to expected
monetary policy changes. While he has revisited
the topic since then, and critically appraised the
paper, it was important in integrating the role of
money into neo-classical economics, and in the
synthesis of General Equilibrium and macroeconomic
models. 

In 1983 he applied this information asymmetry
argument to the role of central banks, and
concluded that central banks, in order to have
credibility in inflation fighting, have to be
locked into inflation targets that they cannot
violate to reduce unemployment. (See also
Monetarism, Phillips Effect, Inflation) This line
of thinking has been influential in the creation
of the Maastricht treaty for the European Central
Bank.

His 1984 Macroeconomics textbook remains a
standard for explaining the subject, and his 1995
book, with Sala-i-Martin, on Economic Growth is
widely cited and read.

Another work which is cited is a paper where he
was a co-author with Gary Becker A Reformulation
of the Economic Theory of Fertility," published in
the Quarterly Journal of Economics, which is
influential in thinking about "infinite time
horizon" modelling.

In the last decade, Dr. Barro has begun
investigating the influence of religion and
popular culture on political economy, working with
Rachel McCleary.

Dr. Barro's work has been central to many of the
economic and public policy debates of the last 30
years, including business cycle theory, growth
theory, the neo-classical synthesis and public
policy. 

== References ==

"Are Government Bonds Net Wealth?", 1974, Journal
of Political Economy
Barro, Robert  Rational expectations and the role
of monetary policy. MonetaryEconomy 2:1-32.1976. 

== External Links ==

http://post.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/barro/ba
rro.html Dr. Barro's web page.

de:Robert J. Barro