Robert Joseph Barro (born September 28, 1944) is an American macroeconomist and the Paul M. Warburg Professor of Economics at Harvard University.
[2] He is currently a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution and co-editor of the influential Quarterly Journal of Economics.
It argued that under certain assumptions, present governmental borrowing would be matched by increased bequests to future generations to pay future taxes expected to pay down the government bonds; thus a lowering of current taxes, financed by the issuance of government bonds, would have no effect on the public's spending on consumer goods.
The paper was in direct response to Alan Blinder and Robert Solow's results, which had implied that the long term implications of government borrowing would be compensated for by the wealth effect.
In it and other essays, he investigated the real effects of monetary changes through which he could significantly contribute to the clarification of the exact circumstances of the validity of the policy-ineffectiveness proposition.
While he has revisited the topic since then and critically appraised the paper, it was important in integrating the role of money into neoclassical economics and into the synthesis of general equilibrium and macroeconomic models.
Subsequently, Barro began investigating the influence of religion and popular culture on political economy by working with his wife, Rachel McCleary.
[15] The Research Papers in Economics (RePEc) project ranked him as the fifth most influential economist in the world, as of March 2016, based on his academic contributions.