Carmen M. Reinhart

Carmen M. Reinhart is the Minos A. Zombanakis Professor of the International Financial System at Harvard Kennedy School. Previously she was the Dennis Weatherstone Senior Fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics and Professor of Economics and Director of the Center for International Economics at the University of Maryland. She received her Ph.D. from Columbia University. Professor Reinhart held positions as Chief Economist and Vice President at the investment bank Bear Stearns in the 1980s, where she became interested in financial crises, international contagion and commodity price cycles. Subsequently, she spent several years at the International Monetary Fund. She is a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, a Research Fellow at the Centre for Economic Policy Research and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Reinhart has served on numerous editorial boards, panels, and has testified before congress. She has written and published on a variety of topics in macroeconomics and international finance and trade including: international capital flows, exchange rates, inflation and commodity prices, banking and sovereign debt crises, currency crashes, and contagion. Her papers have been published in leading scholarly journals.

Her work has helped to inform the understanding of financial crises for over a decade. In the early 1990s, she wrote about the fickleness of capital flows to emerging markets and the likelihood of abrupt reversals--before the Mexican crisis of 1994-1995. Prior to the Asian crisis (1997-1998), she documented the international historical links between asset price bubbles and banking crises, and how the latter could lead to currency crashes creating a "twin crisis." She identified the possibility of severe economic dislocations from the sub-prime crisis in 2007. Her work is frequently featured in the financial press around the world.

Her best-selling book (with Kenneth S. Rogoff)  entitled This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly (Princeton Press) documents the striking similarities of the recurring booms and busts that have characterized financial history and has been translated to 20 languages and won the 2010 TIIA-CREF Paul Samuelson Award and the Gold Medal in the Council on Foreign Relations Arthur Ross Book 2011 Awards.

Reinhart and Rogoff's papers on public debt and growth, which came after their 2009 book, explore the long-term secular growth consequences of very high public debt.  This work, which does not advocate macroeconomic austerity in the face of a deep financial crisis, has come under criticism.  A guide to their responses to those critics can be found here.

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New:

"A Series of Unfortunate Events: Common Sequencing Patterns in Financial Crises," forthcoming in Rivista di Politica Economica, Vol No. XII Angelo Costa Lecture, October 2011.

"From Financial Crash to Debt Crisis," (with Kenneth S. Rogoff). American Economic Review, Vol. 101, No. 5, August, 2011, 1676-1706.

"Limits of Monetary Policy in Theory and Practice," (with Vincent Reinhart). Cato Journal, Vol. 31, No. 3, Fall 2011, 427-439.

"The Forgotten History of Domestic Debt," (with Kenneth S. Rogoff). Economic Journal, Vol. 121, Issue 552, May 2011, 319-350.

"Addicted to Dollars," (with Kenneth S. Rogoff and Miguel A. Savastano), forthcoming in Economía.

"Graduation from Debt, Inflation, and Banking Crises: Elusive or Illusion?" (with Rong Qian and Kenneth S. Rogoff) in Daron Acemoglu and Michael Woodford, eds. NBER Macroeconomics Annual 2010. Vol. 25, Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2010 (lead article).

"Growth in a Time of Debt," (with Kenneth S. Rogoff), American Economic Review, Vol. 100 No. 2, May 2010, 573-578.

"When the North Last Headed South: Revisiting the 1930s" (with Vincent R. Reinhart), Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, Fall 2009, 251-272.