Martin Stuart Feldstein

Martin Stuart "Marty" Feldstein (born November 25, 1939) was an American economist. He is currently the George F. Baker Professor of Economics at Harvard University, and the president emeritus of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). He served as President and Chief Executive Officer of the NBER from 1978 through 2008. From 1982 to 1984, Feldstein served as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers and as chief economic advisor to President Ronald Reagan (where his deficit hawk views clashed with Reagan administration economic policies). He has also been a member of the Washington-based financial advisory body the Group of Thirty since 2003.

Feldstein was born in New York City to a Jewish family and graduated from South Side High School in Rockville Centre, New York. He completed his undergraduate education at Harvard University (B.A., Summa Cum Laude, 1961), where he was affiliated with Adams House, and then attended University of Oxford (B.Litt., 1963; D.Phil., 1967). He was also a Fellow of Nuffield College, Oxford from 1964 to 1967, and is now an Honorary Fellow of the College.

In 1977, he received the John Bates Clark Medal of the American Economic Association, a prize awarded every two years to the economist under the age of 40 who is judged to have made the greatest contribution to economic science. He is among the 10 most influential economists in the world according to IDEAS/RePEc. He is the author of more than 300 research articles in economics and is known primarily for his work on macroeconomics and public finance. He has pioneered much of the research on the working mechanism and sustainability of public pension systems. Feldstein is an avid advocate of Social Security reform and was a main driving force behind former President George W. Bush's initiative of partial privatization of the Social Security system. Aside from his contributions to the field of public sector economics, he has also authored other important macroeconomics papers. One of his more well-known papers in this field was his investigation with Charles Horioka of investment behavior in various countries. He and Horioka found that in the long run, capital tends to stay in its home country – that is to say, a nation's savings is used to fund its investment opportunities. This has since been known as the "Feldstein–Horioka puzzle".

In 1997, writing about the upcoming European monetary union and the euro, Feldstein warned that the "adverse economic effects of a single currency on unemployment and inflation would outweigh any gains from facilitating trade and capital flows" and that, while "conceived of as a way of reducing the risk of another intra-European war", it was "more likely to have the opposite effect" and "lead to increased conflicts within Europe and between Europe and the United States".

In 2005, Feldstein was widely considered a leading candidate to succeed chairman Alan Greenspan as Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board. This was in part due to his prominence in the Reagan administration and his position as an economic advisor for the Bush presidential campaign. The New York Times wrote an editorial advocating that Bush choose either Feldstein or Ben Bernanke due to their credentials, and the week of the nomination The Economist predicted that the two men had the greatest probability of selection out of the field of candidates. Ultimately, the position went to Bernanke, possibly because Feldstein was a board member of AIG, which announced the same year that it would restate five years of past financial reports by $2.7 billion. Subsequently, AIG suffered a massive financial collapse that played a central role in the worldwide economic crisis of 2007–08 and the ensuing global recession. The firm was rescued only by multiple capital infusions by the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank, which extended a $182.5 billion line of credit. Although Feldstein was not explicitly linked to the accounting practices in question, he had served as a Director of AIG since 1988. In March 2007, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation announced that one of four 2007 Bradley Prizes to honor outstanding achievement would be awarded to Feldstein. On September 10, 2007, Feldstein announced that he would be stepping down as president of NBER effective June 2008.

Feldstein served as a member of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board from 2007 to 2009.

Feldstein said in March 2008 he believed the United States was in a recession and it could be a severe one.

As a member of the board of AIG Financial Products, Feldstein was one of those who had oversight of the division of the international insurer that contributed to the company's crisis in September, 2008. In May 2009, Feldstein announced he would step down as a director of AIG.[10] He served as a board member for Eli Lilly and Company. He also previously served on the boards of several other public companies including JPMorgan and TRW.

On February 6, 2009, Feldstein was announced as one of U.S. President Obama's advisors on the President's Economic Recovery Advisory Board. He is now a member of an advisory board to the Department of Defense.

He currently serves on the board of directors of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission, the Group of 30 and the National Committee on United States-China Relations.[8] Feldstein was invited to participate in the Bilderberg Group annual conferences in 2008 and 2010 through 2013. He is also a member of the JP Morgan Chase International Council, a member of the Academic Advisory Council of the American Enterprise Institute, and a member of the British Academy.

In 2011 he was included in the 50 Most Influential ranking of Bloomberg Markets Magazine.

Teaching A well-known figure on the Harvard campus, Feldstein taught the introductory economics class "Social Analysis 10: Principles of Economics" for twenty years, being succeeded by N. Gregory Mankiw. The class was routinely the largest class at Harvard, and remains one of the largest, having been passed in 2007 by Michael Sandel's "Justice" (Moral Reasoning 22). He currently teaches courses in American economic policy and public sector economics at Harvard College.

Feldstein may have made one of his greatest impacts through the concentration of his students in top echelons of government and academia. These include: Larry Summers, former Harvard president and U.S. Treasury secretary; David Ellwood, dean of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government; and James Poterba, MIT professor and member of Bush's tax reform advisory panel. Lawrence Lindsey, formerly Bush's top economic adviser, wrote his doctoral thesis under Feldstein, as did Harvey S. Rosen, the previous chairman of the president's Council of Economic Advisers, Douglas Elmendorf, the current Director of the Office or Management and Budget, José Piñera, Chile's Secretary of Labor and Social Security during its pension privatization in 1980–1981, Jeffrey Sachs, Director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, and Glenn Hubbard, Bush's first chairman of the council and now dean of the Columbia Business School.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Feldstein

Source - Astro databank www.astro.com

Biography

Martin Feldstein is the son of Meyer Feldstein, an attorney in general practice, and Esther (Gevarter) Feldstein. When he was 11 years old, his family moved to Rockville Center, Long Island, where he attended South Side High School. In 1957 he entered Harvard University on a scholarship. He had originally intended to pursue a law degree like his father, but instead majored in economics. He also took all the required premedical courses. For his senior thesis, he creatively combined the two subjects in a cost-benefit analysis suggesting new ways of allocating government medical research monies.

After earning a Harvard B.A. degree in economics, summa cum laude, 1961, Feldstein attended Oxford University on a Fulbright fellowship. His plan was to study health economics for a year or two and then return to Harvard for a medical degree. However, while he was at Oxford, he learned of econometrics, the statistical study of economics data using the computer. Intrigued by this new discipline, he stayed at Oxford for six years. In 1964, he earned an M.A. degree, and in 1967, his Ph.D. From 1965 to 1967 he lectured on public finance at Nuffield, Oxford and published numerous papers on the British national health system.

Feldstein returned to the U.S. in 1967 as an assistant professor of economics at Harvard University. Within two years, he rose to full rank of professor. During the late 1960s and 1970s, Feldstein produced econometric analyses of public subsidy programs and tax laws that helped lay the groundwork for the development of supply-side economics. His standard-setting use of econometrics in public policy issues won him the regard of conservative and liberal colleagues alike.

Perhaps his most controversial were his studies of the Social Security system. The detailed report of his findings was first published in the Journal of Political Economy in 1974. Feldstein claimed that the federal retirement program retarded national economic growth because it discouraged personal savings by an estimated 50 percent. He was at the forefront of the growing ranks of young, conservative economists who became known as "supply-siders," a term used to differentiate them from the demand-oriented Keynesians. Based on his conviction that he had found solutions to the nation’s economic problems, he set out in the late 1970s, to influence policymaking at the highest level. He published studies and contributed regularly to professional journals. He made frequent appearances before congressional committees while carefully avoided identification with either political party to preserve his non-partisan stance. In 1975, he declined President Gerald Ford’s offer of a seat on the Council of Economic Advisers. Feldstein’s influence increased substantially when he was named president of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) in April 1977. A non-profit economic research organization, the NBER is best known for its reliable, independent reviews of government statistical data. Under his direction, the NBER began an ambitious publishing program. The organization published up to 200 papers per year, many of them reflecting the conservative perspective of the new bureau president. He came under fire from critics who charged that he was using the bureau as "his own private vehicle." Feldstein replied to the critics by arguing that the organization’s conservative shift merely reflected the rightward drift of the economics profession as a whole. In 1977, he received the John Bates Black Medal, given biennially to the most distinguished American economist under the age of 40.

By the early 1980s, Feldstein was generally considered the leading academic spokesperson for "supply-siders" in Washington. President-elect Ronald Reagan considered him for his Council of Economic Advisers, but Feldstein declined. Approached a second time in the summer of 1982, he accepted. Some analysts speculated that Feldstein may have been unable to resist the opportunity to save the foundering Reaganomics. Before agreeing to the post, Feldstein gained assurances from the White House that he would play a key role in economic policy-making, along with Secretary of the Treasury, Donald Regan and David Stockman, director of the Office of Management and Budget.

Feldstein secured a leave of absence from Harvard, and took over the chairmanship of the Council of Economic Advisors on 9/08/1982, pending Senate confirmation. He was confirmed on 12/08/1982 by a vote of 77 to 18. The first major test of his influence in the White House hierarchy came in December 1982 when he disagreed with other top forecasters over the projected growth rate for 1983. He claimed that these projections were overly optimistic and with the help of a number of respected young economists recruited from Harvard, projected a growth rate of "around 3 percent." Although he reportedly threatened to resign, ultimately the others gave in and Feldstein’s projections were used in President Reagan’s budget and economic forecast.

Feldstein held the post of chairman of President Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisors until 1984. Feldstein has served on the editorial boards of Public Interest, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, and the Review of Economics and Statistics, and he has been coeditor of the Journal of Public Economics. He continues to publish prolifically on the topic of economic policy. He is the author or editor of numerous books, including: The Risk of Economic Crisis (editor, July 1991), American Economic Policy in the 1980s (editor, August 1995) and Privatizing Social Security (paperback edition, April 2000). As of May 2000, he is the President and CEO of the NBER. Described as "unathletic-looking," Feldstein is 5’ 9" tall and of average build. Economics is both his vocation and avocation and he has few other interests. Cross-country skiing outings and traveling with his family are among his few outside activities. His wife, Kathleen Foley Feldstein, whom he married on 6/19/1965, is also an economist. Their two daughters are Margaret and Janet.

Link to Wikipedia biography