About

Kenneth Rogoff is the Maurits C. Boas Professor of Economics at Harvard University and a former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund (IMF). He is widely recognized for his influential 2009 book co-authored with Carmen Reinhart, "This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly," which demonstrates the remarkable quantitative similarities across time and countries in the roots and aftermath of debt and financial crises. Rogoff has made pioneering contributions to the study of central bank independence and exchange rates. He is also the co-author of the widely-used graduate textbook, "Foundations of International Macroeconomics." In 2016, he published "The Curse of Cash," a book that explores the history and future of currency, from standardized coinage to cryptocurrencies. His monthly syndicated column on global economic issues is published in over 50 countries. Rogoff's forthcoming 2025 book, "Our Dollar, Your Problem: An Insider’s View of Seven Turbulent Decades of Global Finance and the Road Ahead," offers a comprehensive view of the post-war rise of the U.S. dollar, the challenges faced by the rest of the world in dealing with it, and insights into the evolving global financial system. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and is consistently ranked among the top dozen most cited economists worldwide. In addition to his academic research and lectures, Professor Rogoff frequently speaks to a diverse range of audiences globally, including central banks, finance ministries, government and non-government organizations, financial institutions, energy groups, and major companies.

Research topics

• Finance
• Economics
• Political Science
• Monetary economics
• Geography
• Financial system
• International economics
• Macroeconomics
• Environmental science
• Business
• Keynesian economics

Selected publications

• A Tale of Two Countries – The Real Estate Crises in 1990s Japan and Contemporary China

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2026-01-01

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Perspectives on Japan’s continuing exorbitant privilege

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2026-01-01

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Our Dollar, Your Problem

  Yale University Press eBooks · 2025-05-06 · 3 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Debt supercycle versus secular stagnation

  Journal of Policy Modeling · 2025-06-26

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Our Dollar, Your Problem

  Yale University Press eBooks · 2025-04-10 · 5 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding

  A leading economist explores the global rise of the U.S. dollar and shows why its future stability is far from assured Our Dollar, Your Problem argues that America’s currency might not have reached today’s lofty pinnacle without a certain amount of good luck. Drawing in part on his own experiences, including with policymakers and world leaders, Kenneth Rogoff animates the remarkable postwar run of the dollar—how it beat out the Japanese yen, the Soviet ruble, and the euro—and the challenges it faces today from crypto and the Chinese yuan, the end of reliably low inflation and interest rates, political instability, and the fracturing of the dollar bloc. Americans cannot take for granted that the Pax Dollar era will last indefinitely, not only because many countries are deeply frustrated with the system, but also because overconfidence and arrogance can lead to unforced errors. Rogoff shows how America’s outsized power and exorbitant privilege can spur financial instability—not just abroad but also at home.

  PublisherDOI

• Rethinking the Informal Economy and the Hugo Effect

  Journal of the European Economic Association · 2025-01-31 · 3 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Abstract This paper offers a new approach to measuring the size of the informal economy based on VAT data for the European Union. Although data intensive, our evading value added duty economy (EVADE) measure is simpler and more transparent than existing measures. EVADE also shows more variation across countries of Europe than earlier measures, including higher informality in Greece, Italy, and Spain, for example. Moreover, we find considerably higher variation within countries across time; in a cross-country time series regression, controlling for tax rates, we confirm that the informal economy grows significantly in recessions and decreases in booms, which we term the “Hugo effect”.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Long-Run Trends in Long-Maturity Real Rates, 1311–2022

  American Economic Review · 2024-07-30 · 41 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Taking advantage of key recent advances in long-run economic and financial data, we analyze the statistical properties of global long-maturity real interest rates over the past seven centuries. In contrast to existing consensus, we find that real interest rates are in fact trend stationary and exhibit a persistent downward trend since the Renaissance. We investigate structural breaks in real interest rates over time and find that overall the Black Death and the 1557 “Trinity default” appear as consistent inflection points. We further show that demographic and productivity factors do not represent convincing drivers of real interest rates over long spans. (JEL E43, F30, N20)

  PublisherDOI

• Rethinking China’s growth

  Economic Policy · 2024-03-20 · 26 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract China’s outsized growth has almost continually surpassed outsiders’ expectations for four decades and may continue to do so in the future. However, a key element of the growth model, heavy reliance on real estate and infrastructure construction, may finally be running into diminishing returns. This paper summarizes new city-level data on China’s real estate and infrastructure capital from 2000 to 22 and provides evidence suggesting that the growth returns to new building may be falling in some regions. At the same time, real estate investment in particular has been a significant contributing factor to the local government debt vulnerabilities. Finally, the paper presents new findings on the combined direct and indirect impact of real estate and infrastructure construction on China’s economy, which has consistently exceeded 30% of GDP in recent years.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Changing Central Bank Pressures and Inflation

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01 · 4 citations

  articleOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Changing Central Bank Pressures and Inflation

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2024-04-01 · 11 citations

  reportOpen access

  We present a simple long-run aggregate demand and supply framework for evaluating long-run inflation. The framework illustrates how exogenous economic and political economy factors generate central bank pressures that can impact long-run inflation as well as transitions between steady states. We use the analysis to provide a fresh perspective on the forces that drove global inflation downward over the past four decades. We argue that for inflation to remain low and stable in the future, political economy factors, such as strengthened central bank independence or more credible public debt policy, would need to offset the global economic pressures now pushing average long-run inflation upwards.

  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• International Financial Crises in Long-Term Historical Perspective

  NSF · $470k · 2009–2015

Frequent coauthors

• Carmen Reinhart

  298 shared

• Eswar Prasad

  95 shared

• M. Ayhan Köse

  Brookings Institution

  80 shared

• Shang‐Jin Wei

  National Bureau of Economic Research

  79 shared

• Barbara Rossi

  69 shared

• Maurice Obstfeld

  60 shared

• Yu-Chin Chen

  University of Arizona

  56 shared

• Jeremy Bulow

  Stanford University

  35 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Economics

  Massachusetts Institute of Technology

  1979

• B.A., Economics

  Yale University

  1975

Awards & honors

• 2011 winner of the biennial Deutsche Bank Prize awarded by t…