Paul Romer

In a previous post, I presented a “dots in a box” model of the spread of a virus.

To understand the effects that more testing could have on the course of the pandemic, I constructed a simple model that I could use to simulate and visualize the effects of different policies.

Nicolas Lemann starts his book, Transaction Man, with a reminder: There are moments in history when everything seems calm, when there isn’t obvious, bitter contention about big questions.

Answers to questions about by my proposal for a tax on targeted digital ads.

Today the FT published an Op-Ed featuring my recommendations for the new President of the World Bank.

I appreciate your inquiry and will do my best to get back to you as soon as possible.

I now use an Ed25519 key pair to sign important communications.

Paul Romer is a University Professor at Boston College and directs its new Center for the Economics of Ideas.

Many people ask why I received the Nobel Prize* in Economics.

When I was working on growth in the 1990s, I wrote an article on economic growth for an encyclopedia of economics.

In the summer of 2016, I discussed an important paper by Martin Stuermer and Gregor Schwerhoff at an academic meeting and wrote up a blog post that summarized the key points from my discussion.

A recent post at fivethirtyeight.com reaches a conclusion that is plainly false.

The Atlantic has a great article on new ways to share research results.

The Financial Times quoted accurately the following sentence from an internal email that I wrote: “Imagine a field of science in which people publish research papers with data that are obviously fabricated. …”Some readers mistakenly assumed that this sent…

In a conversation with a reporter, I made comments about the Doing Business report that gave the impression that I suspected political manipulation or bias.

As a follow up to the story in the Wall Street Journal (paywall), I’ve been delving into the details of the calculations behind the World Bank’s Doing Business rankings for Chile.

Because it is New Year’s Eve, I indulged in some Twitter.

Someone from at the World Bank wrote to ask what I thought about the Nobel Prize for Dick Thaler.

Well, I figured that we’d get to this point.

For more that 20 years, October has been the time when the eager beavers in the university PR department get a little too excited as they drill in preparation for the possibility that I might receive a Nobel prize.

In an interview I gave to a Swedish newspaper last week, I said that Sweden could consider new responses to the refugee crisis.

Dear Professor Romer, I am writing you about your recent working paper The Trouble with Macroeconomics that generated lots of reactions.

My new working paper, The Trouble with Macroeconomics, has generated some interesting reactions.

I just learned that a rough version of a paper that I am working on called “The Trouble with Macroeconomics” was posted on a server and has been making the rounds.

I lived with a surgeon for 25 years.

Alain Bertaud once told me, ruefully, that he was part of a failed effort at the World Bank to end the implicit subsidy for car trips created by the Bank’s offer of free employee parking.

Someone asked “What if Germany ran Detroit?”

In my work, I have tried to avoid revealing anything about my personal political beliefs and even worked to obfuscate as necessary.

Why do I go back and forth between periods of active blogging/tweeting and periods of silence?

I’m pleased to report that President Jim Yong Kim has asked me to join the World Bank as Chief Economist and I have agreed to accept his offer.

When I was working on growth in the 1990s, I wrote an article on the economic growth for an encyclopedia of economics.

Martha Derthick died recently at the age of 81.

This page provides some background information about the header images for this website.

Short Bio ( < 100 words) Paul Romer, who now directs Boston College’s Center for the Economics of Ideas, received the 2018 Nobel Prize in Economics for showing how different it is when an economy produces and distributes not just physical objects but also…

In the fall of 2011, I joined the Department of Economics at the NYU Stern School of Business.

My previous post, which answered the question, “Why has growth has been speeding up?”

In a previous post I described the evidence that pointed me toward the two big questions that guided me when I was building models of growth: Why has the rate of growth been speeding up over time?

The bar I set for a model is that it should yield answers we believe to questions that matter.

In The Great Escape, Angus Deaton concludes by saying that he is “cautiously optimistic” about the future.

The oral tradition at the University of Chicago attributed the observation that “sloppy writing reflects sloppy thinking” to Milton Friedman.

To me, one of the ways in which my 1990 paper, Endogenous Technological Change, was a step forward relative to the first round models of endogenous growth was the explicit distinction that it allowed between the stock of human capital H and the stock of k…

Joshua Gans has a generous post that notes the 25th anniversary of the publication of my 1990 JPE article.

In an op ed last week, Steve Hilton, a former advisor to the government in the UK, boiled the policy dilemma in Europe down to its essence: Policy paralysis over the refugee crisis is convulsing Europe: Of course we want to help, but if we’re too generous,

In a talk at the World Bank that I gave last week, I repeated a riff that I’ve used before.

An article in The New York Times Magazine has a nice quote from a beltway insider about how politics works: ‘‘Diplomacy is about minimizing differences,’’ he told me. ‘‘ ‘Pol Pot and the Pope — surely there’s something they can agree on.’

Consider these two statements: The model in Lucas (1972), Expectations and the Neutrality of Money, made a path breaking contribution to economic theory.

As an experiment, I’d like to try working with people who can solve technical issues that arise in my research and policy work.

I had hoped to find time to offer a more thoughtful response to Simon Wren Lewis’s most recent comments on the way forward in macroeconomics but life is intruding, and I now I owe a response to Ray Fair (after I look at the work that he points to.)

The people who work in the global-development-consulting-complex seem to develop a hard-wired commitment to the containment paradigm: governments should contain the size of cities.

Blogging on my side interest in macro and growth theory has been crowded out by my day job, which has me in Colombia this week.