Christina Romer, Former Economic Adviser to President Obama, to Give 2018 UMass Amherst Gamble Memorial Lecture

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Christina Romer
Christina Romer

AMHERST, Mass. – Christina Romer, the former chair of the Council of Economic Advisers to President Barack Obama, will deliver the annual Philip Gamble Memorial Lecture at the University of Massachusetts Amherst Thursday, Oct. 18, at 6 p.m. in the Campus Center Auditorium. The event is free and open to the public, with seating available on a first-come, first-served basis.

Romer was one of the four economics principals who met daily with President Obama from 2009-10 to design and guide his administration’s response to the Great Recession, and played a key role in developing macroeconomic policy, the rescue and reform of the financial system, health care reform and budget policy.

She says that following the 2008 financial crisis, a somewhat pessimistic narrative took hold that the aftermath of crises is always terrible. In truth, Romer says new research shows that the aftermath of crises is highly variable, and while some aftermaths are truly awful, some are remarkably benign. Her lecture, “The Aftermath of Financial Crises: What Happens and Why?,” will explore the source of this variation across time and countries, examining how the willingness and ability of governments to use economic policy is a crucial determinant of just how much damage a financial crisis does to the overall economy.

Christina Romer is the Class of 1957-Garff B. Wilson Professor of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley, and co-director of the Program in Monetary Economics at the National Bureau of Economic Research, where she is also a member of the NBER Business Cycle Dating Committee. She is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and recipient of Berkeley’s Distinguished Teaching Award. She has received a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, the National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator Award and an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship. She has served as vice president and a member of the executive committee of the American Economic Association. She joined the Berkeley faculty in 1988 and was promoted to full professor in 1993. Prior to her appointment at Berkeley, she was an assistant professor of economics and public affairs at Princeton University from 1985-88. She received her Ph.D. from M.I.T. in 1985.

Sponsored by the UMass Amherst department of economics and its chair Léonce Ndikumana, the Philip Gamble Memorial Lectureship Endowment was established by alumnus Israel Rogosa and other family and friends in memory of Philip Gamble, a member of the economics faculty from 1935-71 and chair of the department from 1942-65. The fund supports an annual lecture series featuring a prominent economist, and since its inauguration in 1995 Gamble lecturers have included Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen, former U.S. Secretary of Labor Robert Reich and former U.S. Ambassador to India and Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient John Kenneth Galbraith. In total, 10 recipients of the Nobel Prize in Economics have presented the Gamble Lecture.

More information on the UMass Amherst department of economics and the 2018 Gamble Lecture by Christina Romer can be found here. An archive of Romer’s research, writings and columns can be found here. A complete list of previous Gamble lecturers, with video of all speeches since 2008, can be found here.