2-Paragraph Biography

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Robert J. Gordon is Stanley G. Harris Professor in the Social Sciences and Professor of Economics at Northwestern University.

Gordon is one of the world’s leading experts on inflation, unemployment, and long-term economic growth. His recent work asking whether U. S. economic growth is “almost over” has been widely cited, and in 2016 he was named as one of Bloomberg’s top 50 most influential people in the world. Gordon is author of The Rise and Fall of American Growth: the US Standard of Living Since the Civil War (published in January 2016 by the Princeton University Press). He is also author of Macroeconomics, twelfth edition, The Measurement of Durable Goods Prices, The American Business Cycle, and The Economics of New Goods. His book of collected essays is Productivity Growth, Inflation, and Unemployment.

Gordon did his undergraduate work at Harvard and then attended Oxford University on a Marshall Scholarship. He received his Ph.D. in 1967 at M.I.T. and taught at Harvard and the University of Chicago before coming to Northwestern in 1973. He is a Distinguished Fellow of the American Economic Association and a Fellow of both the Econometric Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research and a member of the NBER Business Cycle Dating Committee. He is also a Research Fellow of the Centre for Economic Policy Research (London) and the Observatoire Français des Conjunctures Economiques (OFCE, Paris). He is an economic adviser to the Bureau of Economic Analysis and to the economic forecasting firm MacroAdvisers and a member of the policy advisory panel of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago.