Maurice Obstfeld
Maurice Obstfeld, C. Fred Bergsten Senior Fellow, has been associated with the Peterson Institute for International Economics since February 2019. He is also the Class of 1958 Professor of Economics emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, where he taught between 1991 and 2023. He previously taught at Harvard University (1989–90), the University of Pennsylvania (1986–89), and Columbia University (1979–86).
In addition to his academic positions, Obstfeld served at the International Monetary Fund (IMF) as economic counsellor and director of the research department (2015–18) and as a member of the US President's Council of Economic Advisors (2014–15). Obstfeld was an honorary adviser to the Bank of Japan's Institute of Monetary and Economic Studies (2002–14) and has consulted and taught at the IMF, the World Bank, the European Commission, and numerous central banks around the world.
Obstfeld has received Tilburg University's Tjalling Koopmans Asset Award, the John von Neumann Award of the Rajk László College for Advanced Studies (Budapest), and the Kiel Institute's Bernhard Harms Prize. In 2023, he was named a distinguished fellow of the American Economic Association. He has given a number of prominent lectures, including the American Economic Association's annual Richard T. Ely Lecture, the L. K. Jha Memorial Lecture of the Reserve Bank of India, the Frank D. Graham Memorial Lecture at Princeton University, the Harry Johnson Lecture of the Money Macro and Finance Society, and the Andrew Crockett Memorial Lecture of the Bank for International Settlements. Obstfeld has served on both the executive committee and as vice president of the American Economic Association and as president of the Western Economic Association International. He is a fellow of the Econometric Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, and a distinguished fellow of the Centre for Economic Policy Research.
He is the coauthor of two leading textbooks on international economics, International Economics (12th edition, 2022, with Paul Krugman and Marc Melitz) and Foundations of International Macroeconomics (1996, with Kenneth Rogoff). In addition, he has written, coauthored, or edited more than a hundred research articles and books on exchange rates, currency and other financial crises, global capital markets, and monetary policy.
Obstfeld earned his PhD in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and holds degrees in mathematics from the University of Pennsylvania and King's College, Cambridge University.