Interview with Olivier Blanchard, 17th Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Economics

The BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Awards in Economics, Finance and Management has gone in this seventeenth edition to Olivier Blanchard (Paris School of Economics and MIT), Jordi Galí (CREI and Pompeu Fabra University), and Michael Woodford (Columbia University) for “profoundly influencing modern macroeconomic analysis by establishing rigorous foundations for the study of business cycle fluctuations.”

Olivier Blanchard is one of the researchers with the greatest impact on macroeconomics in the last four decades. Both in terms of theoretical foundations and applied work, and from his academic contributions as well as in terms of influence on public policy.

Blanchard participated in establishing the foundations of the so-called New Keynesian Economics, which is now the basic framework for macroeconomic policy analysis. His study of the effects of monetary policy under conditions of monopolistic competition, together with Nobihuro Kiyotaki, is one of the pillars of this school of thought. Moreover, his treatment of nominal and real wage rigidities and their implications for unemployment is the main reference for the analysis of the effects of macroeconomic policies and the causes of unemployment within the class of Stochastic Dynamic General Equilibrium Models.

Years after laying the foundations for these models he used them in a practical way, when between 2008 and 2016 he was heading the IMF think tank, and had to provide technical analysis to public policy makers and central bank presidents around the world, in the midst of a major financial and debt crisis.

00:04 Professor Blanchard, could you explain what your contribution has been to the architecture of the New Keynesian paradigm and its importance for modern macroeconomic analysis?
01:40 To what extent was your model useful for the definition of public policies during the financial and debt crises of the early 2000s?
03:02 On the basis of your model and your responsibilities in the International Monetary Fund, what advice do you have for Europe's policies in the current geopolitical situation?

Discover more here: https://www.frontiersofknowledgeaward...

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