10 top women in economics

Following her nomination by President Obama to serve on the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, academic economist Kathryn M. Dominguez has joined the growing ranks of prominent female economists at the very top of their profession, including Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen. Away from the media spotlight, there are a number of groundbreaking women helping to shape the discipline.

Below is a list of the top 10 female economists as of June 2015. The rankings were compiled using RePEc data.

10. Olivia S. Mitchell

Mitchell is a professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and executive director of the Pension Research Council. Her work focuses on public and private pensions, insurance and risk management, financial literacy and public finance. She has published 27 books and more than 180 articles.

In her most recent paper, co-authored with Annamaria Lusardi, the authors argue that tackling financial illiteracy is becoming a crucial challenge for governments:

Curing and preventing financial illiteracy is not costless, but investing in financial literacy is likely to bring high payoffs. And our work demonstrates that financial literacy can benefit not only the economically vulnerable in society, but also the population at large.

9. Ellen R. McGrattan

McGrattan works in the Department of Economics at the University of Minnesota and is a consultant for the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. She previously worked in the research department of the Minnesota Fed, where she was the third-highest-ranked researcher.

In March 2015, McGrattan published a fascinating paper on the evidence in favour of wealth taxes, as proposed by French economist Thomas Piketty in his book Capitalism in the Twenty-First Century, among others. Her conclusion from surveying the available evidence is that there is currently insufficient understanding of what we mean by wealth and what impact targeting any particular measure of it would have on the economy.

As she put it:

Unfortunately, current theory on this is insufficiently developed. Without a quantitatively valid theory or previous experience with taxing financial wealth, economists cannot make accurate predictions about the impact that such taxes will have on either aggregate wealth or its dispersion. Thus, any proposals to tax wealth are, at this point, premature.

8. Serena Ng

Ng is a professor at Columbia University in New York. Her particular fields of study are econometrics and macroeconomics.

In a paper she published in March with Kyle Jurado and Sydney Ludvigson, the authors argue that periods of heightened market uncertainty that have an impact on real economic activity are far less common than others have assumed. Indeed, they found only three big macro uncertainty episodes since the Second World War. These were:

the months surrounding the 1973–1974 and 1981–1982 recessions and the Great Recession of 2007–2009, with the 2007–2009 recession the most striking episode of heightened uncertainty since 1960.

7. Claudia Goldin

Goldin is the Henry Lee Professor of Economics at Harvard University and director of the NBER’s Development of the American Economy programme. Her research has covered topics including slavery, the economic impact of war, the female labour force, immigration, New Deal policies, income inequality, technological change, education and the gender gap in pay.

In her widely praised Presidential Address to the American Economics Association last year, she concluded:

What the last chapter must contain for gender equality is not a zero-sum game in which women gain and men lose. Many workers will benefit from greater flexibility, although those who do not value the amenity will likely lose from its lower price.