Paul Robin Krugman (/ˈkrʊɡmən/ ⓘ KRUUG-mən;[4][5] born February 28, 1953)[6] is an American New Keynesian economist who is the Distinguished Professor of Economics at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

[8] The Prize Committee cited Krugman's work explaining the patterns of international trade and the geographic distribution of economic activity, by examining the effects of economies of scale and of consumer preferences for diverse goods and services.

[28][29] He was born in Albany, New York, spent several years of his childhood in the upstate city of Utica,[30] before growing up from age eight in Merrick, a hamlet in Nassau County, Long Island.

[37] Krugman later praised his PhD thesis advisor, Rudi Dornbusch, as "one of the great economics teachers of all time" and said that he "had the knack of inspiring students to pick up his enthusiasm and technique, but find their own paths".

[45] The Nobel Prize Committee stated that Krugman's main contribution is his analysis of the effects of economies of scale, combined with the assumption that consumers appreciate diversity, on international trade and on the location of economic activity.

Krugman's explanation of trade between similar countries was proposed in a 1979 paper in the Journal of International Economics, and involves two key assumptions: that consumers prefer a diverse choice of brands, and that production favors economies of scale.

[59] The "home market effect" that Krugman discovered in NTT also features in NEG, which interprets agglomeration "as the outcome of the interaction of increasing returns, trade costs and factor price differences".

That is, NTT implies that instead of spreading out evenly around the world, production will tend to concentrate in a few countries, regions, or cities, which will become densely populated but will also have higher levels of income.

As a graduate student, Krugman visited the Federal Reserve Board where Stephen Salant and Dale Henderson were completing their discussion paper on speculative attacks in the gold market.

[82][83][84] Krugman has since drawn parallels between Japan's 'lost decade' and the late 2000s recession, arguing that expansionary fiscal policy is necessary as the major industrialized economies are mired in a liquidity trap.

[85] In response to economists who point out that the Japanese economy recovered despite not pursuing his policy prescriptions, Krugman maintains that it was an export-led boom that pulled Japan out of its economic slump in the late-90s, rather than reforms of the financial system.

[90] In June 2012, Krugman and Richard Layard launched A manifesto for economic sense, where they call for greater use of fiscal stimulus policy to reduce unemployment and foster growth.

[95] In the words of the prize committee, "By having integrated economies of scale into explicit general equilibrium models, Paul Krugman has deepened our understanding of the determinants of trade and the location of economic activity.

"[96] A May 2011 Hamilton College analysis of 26 politicians, journalists, and media commentators who made predictions in major newspaper columns or television news shows from September 2007 to December 2008 found that Krugman was the most accurate.

In September 2003, Krugman published a collection of his columns under the title, The Great Unraveling, about the Bush administration's economic and foreign policies and the US economy in the early 2000s.

His columns argued that the large deficits during that time were generated by the Bush administration as a result of decreasing taxes on the rich, increasing public spending, and fighting the Iraq War.

[120] In a review for The New York Times, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David M. Kennedy stated: "Krugman's chapter on the imperative need for health care reform is the best in this book, a rueful reminder of the kind of skilled and accessible economic analysis of which he is capable".

[127] Economist J. Peter Neary has noted that Krugman "has written on a wide range of topics, always combining one of the best prose styles in the profession with an ability to construct elegant, insightful and useful models".

A 2003 article in The Economist[135] questioned Krugman's "growing tendency to attribute all the world's ills to George Bush", citing critics who felt that "his relentless partisanship is getting in the way of his argument" and claiming errors of economic and political reasoning in his columns.

[98] Daniel Okrent, a former The New York Times ombudsman, in his farewell column, criticized Krugman for what he said was "the disturbing habit of shaping, slicing and selectively citing numbers in a fashion that pleases his acolytes but leaves him open to substantive assaults".

[148] Following the article, the Irish Ambassador to the US, Daniel Mulhall, wrote a letter to his publisher saying, "This is not the first time your columnist has used the word 'leprechaun' when referring to Ireland, and I see it as my duty to point out that this represents an unacceptable slur.

"[172] Krugman has criticized China's exchange rate policy, which he believes to be a significant drag on global economic recovery from the Late-2000s recession, and he has advocated a "surcharge" on Chinese imports to the US in response.

[191] In recent academic work, he has collaborated with Gauti Eggertsson on a New Keynesian model of debt-overhang and debt-driven slumps, inspired by the writings of Irving Fisher, Hyman Minsky, and Richard Koo.

[198] In the midst of the 2009 Great Recession, Krugman made a significant departure from his general support for free trade, entertaining the idea of a 25% tariff on Chinese imports as a retaliation for China's policy of maintaining a low value for the renminbi, which many saw as hostile currency manipulation, artificially making their exports more competitive.

[201] He believes that the US should not repeat Reagan's 1981 policy on taxes and quotas on imported products,[202] as even if it does not produce a recession, protectionism would shock "value chains" and disrupt jobs and communities in the same way as free trade in the past.

That's just supply and demand: we're talking about large increases in the number of low-skill workers relative to other inputs into production, so it's inevitable that this means a fall in wages ... the fiscal burden of low-wage immigrants is also pretty clear," citing an estimate of 0.25% of GDP from the National Research Council.

[227][228][229] In his Conscience of a Liberal, he wrote: The changing politics of race made it possible for a revived conservative movement, whose ultimate goal was to reverse the achievements of the New Deal, to win national elections – even though it supported policies that favored the interests of a narrow elite over those of middle- and lower-income Americans.

On election night in 2016, Krugman wrongly predicted in a New York Times op-ed that the markets would never recover under Trump and stated "first-pass answer is never"[236][237] but retracted the call in the same publication three days later.

[a][243] In 2024, amidst the Israel–Hamas war, Krugman wrote that Netanyahu’s government was “killing huge numbers of civilians” but expressed skepticism at President Joe Biden’s ability to stop the body count,[244] but did not elaborate, having said in 2012 that “like many liberal American Jews — and most American Jews are still liberal — I basically avoid thinking about where Israel is going.” In 1998 during the dot-com bubble, Krugman wrote a commentary for Red Herring that urged skepticism of optimistic predictions for technology-driven progress.

He followed it with several pessimistic predictions of his own, including that "[b]y 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet's impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine's"[245][246][247][248] and that the number of jobs for IT specialists would decelerate and turn down.