N. Gregory Mankiw, Distinguished Fellow 2026
N. Gregory Mankiw is the Robert M. Beren Professor of Economics at Harvard University. He received his AB from Princeton University in 1980 and his PhD from MIT in 1984. He joined the Harvard faculty as an assistant professor in 1985 and became a full professor in 1987. He is also a Research Associate of the NBER, where he served as the director of the Monetary Economics Program.
Mankiw has served at the Council of Economic Advisers as a Staff Economist (1982–1983) and two decades later as the Chair (2003–2005). He served on the NBER Business Cycle Dating Committee (1991–2000) and as the Chair of the Harvard Department of Economics (2012–2015). He has served as an adviser to the Federal Reserve Banks of Boston and New York, as well as the Congressional Budget Office. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Mankiw's early research focused on the microeconomic foundations of macroeconomic fluctuations, playing a key role in the development of New Keynesian economics. He showed that small menu costs—the administrative costs firms face when changing prices—lead to economically significant price stickiness, which in turn causes large macroeconomic fluctuations in response to shifts in aggregate demand.
He has also studied long-run economic growth and cross-country variation in per-capita income. His pathbreaking work with David Romer and David Weil empirically evaluated and theoretically augmented the Solow growth model. Their work showed that while the standard Solow model fails to completely explain the cross-country income data, an augmented model that included both the accumulation of physical and human capital provides an excellent predictor of the large differences in per-capita output across countries.
He has done extensive work on consumer behavior and inflation dynamics. Using aggregate data, his research with John Campbell shows that a large fraction of consumers base their spending primarily on current income rather than lifetime resources, a departure from the classical permanent income hypothesis. His later work with Ricardo Reis introduced the "sticky information" model, which shows how macroeconomic sluggishness can be driven by the slow diffusion of information among economic agents, an alternative to the mechanism of strictly rigid prices.
His most recent work has focused on optimal taxation, income inequality, and public policy design. Mankiw is a prominent advocate for the use of Pigouvian taxes, having founded the "Pigou Club" to encourage adoption of a carbon tax to efficiently address environmental externalities.
Finally, Mankiw has written hundreds of editorials, all aiming to make economic principles accessible to a broader audience. He wrote a recurring column for the Sunday business section of The New York Times from 2007 to 2021. He has also been a frequent contributor to The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post. In addition to traditional news media, he also published Greg Mankiw's Blog, which became one of the most widely read economics blogs among students, academics, and policymakers.
In summary, Mankiw’s work has led to foundational improvements in our understanding of price stickiness, consumer behavior, economic fluctuations, and economic growth. His writings fundamentally changed modern macroeconomics, improved economic literacy, and advanced the efficacy of economic policymaking.