Valerie Ramey

Expertise

• Macroeconomics
• Monetary Policy
• Economic Growth
• Climate Change
• Fiscal Policy

LEARN MORE

• Download Headshot

• Email Valerie Ramey
• Valerie Ramey’s Personal Website
• View Short Bios

  Valerie Ramey

  Thomas Sowell Senior Fellow

  Short Bio

  Valerie Ramey is the Thomas Sowell Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution.  She specializes in macroeconomics, with a special focus on the effects of monetary and fiscal policy.  She is chair of the NBER Business Cycle Dating Committee and is a member of the Panel of Economic Advisers for the Congressional Budget Office.

  Copy Bio

  Mid-Length Bio

  Valerie Ramey is the Thomas Sowell Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution.  She is also a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, a Research Fellow of the Centre for Economic Policy and Research,  a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a Fellow of the Econometric Society.  She has served as co-editor of the American Economic Review,  on several National Science Foundation Advisory panels, on the Federal Economic Statistics Advisory Committee, and as a consultant to the IMF.  She is currently a member of on the Panel of Economic Advisers for the Congressional Budget Office and is chair of the NBER Business Cycle Dating Committee. She is a co-editor of the NBER Macro Annual.

  Ramey graduated summa cum laude from the University of Arizona with a Bachelors in Economics and Spanish (double major) and went on to earn a Ph.D. in Economics from Stanford University.  For 36 years, she was a member of the faculty of the Economics Department of the University of California, San Diego and also served as chair.  She is now professor emerita.  She joined the Hoover Institution as a Senior Fellow in September 2023.  She co-leads the Hoover Economic Policy Working Group seminars and the annual Hoover Monetary Policy Conference.  She is the incoming Deputy Director of Research for the Hoover Institution.

  Ramey has published numerous scholarly articles and policy-relevant articles on macroeconomic topics such as the sources of business cycles, the effects of monetary and fiscal policy, the effects of oil price shocks, and the impact of volatility on growth.  She is best known for her work that estimates the size of government spending multipliers.  She has also written numerous articles on trends in wage inequality and trends in time use.  For example, she has studied the increase in time investments in children by educated parents; she and her husband coined the term “The Rug Rat Race” in their 2010 paper of the same name.  Her recent work studies the propensity of households to save rather than consume the funds from temporary stimulus checks.  She has also been studying the projected effects of climate change on economic growth. 

  Ramey’s work has been featured in major media, such as the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times.  She regularly presents academic and policy talks in the U.S. and internationally and meets with monetary and fiscal policymakers.

  Copy Bio

  To view, the complete bio visit https://www.hoover.org/profiles/valerie-ramey.