Research Expertise and Interest
economics, exchange rate, lending booms, consumption, capital flows, global imbalances, external adjustment, international prices, international portfolios, financial crises, eurozone crisis
Research Description
Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas is a professor in the Department of Economics, and the S.K. and Angela Chan Professor of Global Management. His main research interests are in international macroeconomics and finance. His research focuses on the scarcity of global safe assets, global imbalances and currency wars; on the International Monetary System and the role of the U.S. dollar; on the Dominant Currency Paradigm; on the determinants of capital flows to and from developing countries; on international portfolios ; on the global financial crisis of 2008 and the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. Professor Gourinchas is the laureate of the 2007 Bernàcer Prize for best European economist working in macroeconomics and finance under the age of 40, and of the 2008 Prix du Meilleur Jeune Economiste for best French economist under the age of 40. In 2012-2013, Professor Gourinchas was a member of the French Council of Economic Advisors to the Prime Minister. From 2009 to 2016 he was the editor-in-chief of the IMF Economic Review and from 2017 to 2019 the managing editor of the Journal of International Economics. He is currently co-editor of the American Economic Review and director of the NBER's International Finance and Macroeconomics Program.
Professor Gourinchas grew up in France where he attended Ecole Polytechnique. He received his PhD in 1996 from MIT and taught at Stanford Graduate School of Business and Princeton University before joining UC Berkeley department of economics in 2003.
Featured in the Media
Economics professor Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas is among a group of more than 40 leading economists who have contributed to an eBook from the Centre for Economic Policy Research, urging quick and powerful fiscal responses to the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic. "We are facing a joint health and economic crisis of unprecedented proportions in recent history," he says in his chapter about how to flatten the infection and recession curves. Fiscal policies that governments can use to prevent or limit catastrophic collapses, are like the "intensive care units, beds and ventilators of the economic system," he says.