Olivier Blanchard joined the Peterson Institute for International Economics as the first C. Fred Bergsten Senior Fellow in October 2015. A citizen of France, Blanchard has spent most of his professional life in Cambridge, MA. After obtaining his PhD in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1977, he taught at Harvard University, and returned to MIT in 1982. He was chair of the economics department from 1998 to 2003. In 2008, he took a leave of absence to be the economic counselor and director of the Research Department at the International Monetary Fund. He remains Robert M. Solow Professor of Economics emeritus at MIT.
He is a macroeconomist, who has worked on a wide range of issues, from the role of monetary policy, the nature of speculative bubbles, the nature of the labor market and the determinants of unemployment, transition in former communist countries, and to forces behind the recent global financial crisis. In the process, he has worked with numerous countries and international organizations. He is the author of many books and articles, including two textbooks on macroeconomics, one at the graduate level with Stanley Fischer and the other at the undergraduate level.