Robert J. Barro
Senior Fellow

Expertise: Macroeconomics; economic growth, with emphasis on the role of political institutions; monetary theory; property rights; public finance

Robert J. Barro is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Paul M. Warburg Professor of Economics at Harvard University.

Barro's expertise is in the areas of macroeconomics, economic growth, and monetary theory. He is currently researching the interplay between religion and political economy.

He has written extensively on macroeconomics, especially on economic growth, public debt, and monetary policy. His books include Determinants of Economic Growth: A Cross-Country Empirical Study (MIT Press, 1997), Macroeconomics (MIT Press, 1997), Getting It Right: Markets and Choices in a Free Society (MIT Press, 1996) and, as coauthor, Economic Growth (McGraw Hill, 1995). His new book, Nothing Is Sacred: Economic Ideas for the New Millennium, is forthcoming from MIT Press.

Barro is a viewpoint columnist for Business Week and a frequent contributor to the Wall Street Journal. He is also associate editor of the Journal of Monetary Economics as well as the Journal of Economic Growth.

He is the forthcoming president of the Western Economic Association, was recently vice president of the American Economic Association, and is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Econometric Society.

In 1996, Barro was appointed a member of the Academic Advisory Board of the Congressional Budget Office.

He has been a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research since 1978. He is also a member of the Mont Pelerin Society.

Before his appointments at Harvard University and the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, Barro was a professor of economics at the University of Chicago and a professor of economics at the University of Rochester.

Barro received a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University.