Biography

Father of the EURO’ & 1999 winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics

For the past twenty five years, Robert Mundell has been Professor of Economics at Columbia University in New York . He studied at the University of British Columbia and the London School of Economics before receiving his Ph.D. from MIT. He taught at Stanford University and the Bologna (Italy) Center of the School of Advanced International Studies of the Johns Hopkins University before joining, in 1961, the staff of the International Monetary Fund.

From 1966 to 1971 he was a Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago and Editor of the Journal of Political Economy; he was also summer Professor of International Economics at the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva, Switzerland. In 1974 he came to Columbia University.

Professor Mundell has lectured widely in North and South America, Europe, Africa, Australia and Asia.
He has been an adviser to a number of international agencies and organizations including the United Nations, the IMF, the World Bank, the Government of Canada, several governments in Latin America and Europe, the Federal Reserve Board and the US Treasury. In 1970, he was a consultant to the Monetary Committee of the European Economic Commission, and in 1972-3 a member of the nine consultants to the Commission that prepared a report in Brussels on European monetary integration. He was a member of the Bellagio-Princeton study group on International Monetary Reform from 1964 to 1978 and Chairman of the Santa Colomba Conferences on International Monetary Reform between 1971 and 1987.

The author of numerous works and articles on economic theory of international economics, he is known as the father of the theory of optimum currency areas; he formulated what became a standard international macroeconomics model; he was a pioneer of the theory of the monetary and fiscal policy mix; he reformulated the theory of inflation and interest; he was a co-developer of the monetary approach to the balance of payments; and he was an originator of supply-side economics. He has written extensively on the history of the international monetary system and played a significant role in the founding of the Euro. He has also written extensively on the "transition" economies and in 1997 co-founded the Zagreb Journal of Economics.

Professor Mundell gave the Frank Graham Memorial Lecture at Princeton University in 1965, the Marshall Lectures at Cambridge University in 1974, the Ohlin Lectures in 1998, and the Robbins Memorial Lectures in 2000. In 1983 he received the Jacques Rueff Medal and Prize in the French Senate; in 1997 he became a Distinguished Fellow of the American Economic Association; in 1998, he was made a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Science; and in 1999, he received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science. He has received honorary degrees and professorships in several universities in North America, Europe and Asia.