Michael Dean Woodford American economist Country: USA

Biography of Michael Dean Woodford

Michael Dean Woodford is an American economist specializing in macroeconomics and monetary theory. He is currently a professor at Columbia University. Woodford studied at the University of Chicago for his undergraduate degree, obtained a law degree from Yale, and completed his doctoral studies in economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He began his teaching career at Columbia University and later worked at the University of Chicago and Princeton before returning to Columbia.

Woodford is one of the few economists to have received the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Prize Fellowship. The MacArthur Foundation sponsored his research from 1981 to 1986. In 2007, Woodford was awarded the Deutsche Bank Prize. He is currently a member of the advisory council of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

Early in his career, Woodford conducted research on imperfect competition and the concept of sunspot equilibria. He later shifted his focus to studying macroeconomic models with sticky prices. Together with Julio Rotemberg, Woodford developed one of the first New Keynesian micro models. He then shifted his research interests to studying monetary policy and the theory of price level targeting, the effectiveness of currency policy when using a larger number of credit cards and less cash, and inflation targeting.

Woodford is most well-known as the author of the advanced textbook "Interest and Prices: Foundations of a Theory of Monetary Policy." According to the Deutsche Bank, this work is considered foundational in the field of monetary theory and analysis and is of interest not only to economics students but also to a range of banking professionals. Woodford has also contributed to the writing of other educational and scholarly works, such as John B. Taylor's "Handbook of Macroeconomics," Benjamin M. Friedman's "Handbook of Monetary Economics," and Ben S. Bernanke's "The Inflation Targeting Debate."