Carmen Reinhart

Carmen Reinhart
Born	(1955-10-07) October 7, 1955 Havana, Cuba
Institution	Harvard Kennedy School
Field	International economics
Alma mater	Miami Dade College Florida International University Columbia University
Doctoral advisor	Robert Mundell[1]
Information at IDEAS / RePEc

Carmen M. Reinhart (née Castellanos, born October 7, 1955) is the Minos A. Zombanakis Professor of the International Financial System at Harvard Kennedy School.^[2] Previously, she was the Dennis Weatherstone Senior Fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.^[3] and Professor of Economics and Director of the Center for International Economics at the University of Maryland.^[4] She is a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, a Research Fellow at the Centre for Economic Policy Research, Founding Contributor of VoxEU,^[5] and a member of Council on Foreign Relations. She is also member of American Economic Association, Latin American and Caribbean Economic Association,^[6] and the Association for the Study of the Cuban Economy. She became the subject of general news coverage when mathematical errors were found in a research paper she co-authored.^[7]

Early life and career

Born in Havana, Cuba, Reinhart arrived in the United States on January 6, 1966, with her mother and father and three suitcases. They settled in Pasadena, California, during the early years before moving to South Florida, where she grew up. When the family moved to Miami, Reinhart started college at two-year Miami Dade College, before transferring to Florida International University, where she received a B.A. in Economics (summa cum laude) in 1975.^[1]

Recommended by Peter Montiel, an M.I.T. graduate teaching at FIU,^[8] Reinhart in 1978 went on to attend Columbia University graduate school.^[1] After Reinhart passed her field examinations, she was hired as an economist by Bear Stearns and rose to the investment bank's chief economist three years later.^[1] In 1988 she returned to Columbia to obtain her Ph.D. under the supervision of Robert Mundell.^[1] In the 1990s, she held several positions in the International Monetary Fund. From 2001 to 2003 she returned to the International Monetary Fund as deputy director at the Research Department. She has been the Minos A. Zombanakis Professor of the International Financial System at Harvard Kennedy School since 2012.^[2]

She has served on the editorial boards of The American Economic Review, the Journal of International Economics, International Journal of Central Banking, among others.

In both 2011 and 2012 she was included in the 50 Most Influential ranking of Bloomberg Markets.

Research and publication

She has written and published on a variety of topics in macroeconomics and international finance including: international capital flows, capital controls, inflation and commodity prices, banking and sovereign debt crises, currency crashes, and contagion. Her work has been published in scholarly journals such as The American Economic Review, the Journal of Political Economy, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, and the Journal of Economic Perspectives. Her work is featured in the financial press, including The Economist,^[9] Newsweek,^[10] The Washington Post,^[11] and The Wall Street Journal.^[11] Her book (with Kenneth Rogoff), This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly, studied the striking similarities of the recurring booms and busts that have characterized financial history.^[8][12]

Criticism and controversy

In 2013, Reinhart and Rogoff were in the spotlight after researchers discovered that their 2010 paper "Growth in a Time of Debt" in The American Economic Review Papers and Proceedings had methodological and computational errors. The work argued that debt above 90% of GDP was particularly harmful to economic growth, while corrections have shown this is not the case, and that the negative correlation between debt and growth does not increase above 90% as their work had contended. A separate and previous criticism is that the negative correlation between debt and growth need not be causal.^[7][13] Rogoff and Reinhart claimed that their fundamental conclusions were accurate, despite the errors.^[14][15]

A review by Herndon, Ash and Pollin of her widely cited paper with Rogoff, "Growth in a time of debt", argued that "coding errors, selective exclusion of available data, and unconventional weighting of summary statistics lead to serious errors that inaccurately represent the relationship between public debt and GDP growth among 20 advanced economies in the post-war period".^[16][17][18]

Personal

Reinhart met her future husband, Vincent Reinhart, when they were classmates at Columbia University in the late 1970s.^[1] They have one son.^[4]

Selected publications

• Kenneth Rogoff, and Carmen Reinhart. (2010) "Growth in a Time of Debt." American Economic Review 100.2: 573–78.
• Graciela L. Kaminsky and Carmen Reinhart. (1999). "The Twin Crises: The Causes of Banking and Balance-of-Payments Problems". American Economic Review, 473–500.
• Kenneth Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart. (2009). This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly. Princeton University Press.

References

External links

• Carmen M. Reinhart's homepage at the Peterson Institute for International Economics
• Roberts, Russ (November 23, 2009). "Reinhart on Financial Crises". EconTalk. Library of Economics and Liberty. 
• Appearances on C-SPAN