Paul Krugman

Paul Krugman
Born	Paul Robin Krugman 28 2, 1953
Birthplace	Albany, New York, U.S.
Nationality	American
Occupation	Template:Ubl
Title	Distinguished Professor of Economics
Employer	Template:Ubl
Known for	New trade theory, new economic geography, economic commentary
Education	Massachusetts Institute of Technology (PhD)
Spouse(s)	Robin Wells (m. 1996)
Awards	Template:Ubl
Website	[[paulkrugman.substack.com paulkrugman.substack.com] Official site]

Paul Robin Krugman (Template:IPAc-en Template:Respell; born February 28, 1953) is an American economist, author, and public intellectual who has shaped both academic economics and popular discourse on economic policy for more than four decades. He is the Distinguished Professor of Economics at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and holds the title of Centennial Professor at the London School of Economics. In 2008, Krugman was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his contributions to new trade theory and new economic geography, work that provided formal models explaining patterns of international trade and the geographic concentration of economic activity. Before joining CUNY, Krugman held faculty positions at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Princeton University, where he retired in June 2015 as professor emeritus. From 2000 to 2024, he wrote a column for The New York Times that made him one of the most prominent public commentators on economics and politics in the United States. He has authored or edited 27 books and published more than 200 scholarly articles. A 2011 survey of economics professors named him their favorite living economist under the age of 60, and according to the Open Syllabus Project, he is the second most frequently cited author on college syllabi for economics courses. Following his retirement from the Times in December 2024, Krugman launched a newsletter on Substack that by mid-2025 was reaching 350,000 to 450,000 readers per post.

Early Life

Paul Robin Krugman was born on February 28, 1953, in Albany, New York. He grew up in a middle-class family in the suburbs of Long Island, New York. Krugman has described developing an interest in economics at a relatively young age, influenced in part by the science fiction novels of Isaac Asimov, particularly the Foundation series, in which a mathematician uses statistical methods to predict the future of civilization. This literary encounter reportedly sparked Krugman's fascination with the idea that broad social and economic patterns could be understood through rigorous analytical frameworks.

Krugman came of age during a period of significant economic transformation in the United States. The postwar economic consensus that had characterized the 1950s and 1960s was beginning to unravel by the time he entered college, with rising inflation, the collapse of the Bretton Woods system, and the oil shocks of the 1970s reshaping both economic reality and economic thought. These experiences would inform his later academic work on currency crises and international monetary systems, as well as his public commentary on macroeconomic policy.

The intellectual environment in which Krugman was raised—a period when Keynesian economics was both the dominant paradigm and increasingly under challenge—helped shape his orientation toward questions about how economies function at the aggregate level and how government policy can affect economic outcomes. He would later identify John Maynard Keynes as one of his principal intellectual influences, alongside economists such as Robert Solow, William Nordhaus, and Rudi Dornbusch, the latter of whom would become his doctoral advisor at MIT.

Education

Krugman attended Yale University as an undergraduate, where he studied economics. It was at Yale that he began to engage seriously with the formal tools of economic analysis and developed an interest in international economics. He later pursued graduate studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, one of the preeminent departments of economics in the world. At MIT, Krugman studied under Rudi Dornbusch, a prominent international economist known for his work on exchange rate dynamics. Krugman completed his doctoral dissertation, titled Essays on Flexible Exchange Rates, in 1977. The dissertation examined the behavior of exchange rates under the floating rate system that had replaced the Bretton Woods fixed-rate regime only a few years earlier. This early research laid the groundwork for Krugman's later contributions to international economics and currency crisis theory.

Career

Academic Career

After completing his doctorate, Krugman began his academic career at Yale University, where he served on the faculty before moving to MIT. It was during the late 1970s and early 1980s that Krugman produced the work that would eventually earn him the Nobel Prize. His contributions to what became known as new trade theory fundamentally altered the way economists understood international trade. Prior to Krugman's work, the dominant models of international trade were based on the theory of comparative advantage developed by David Ricardo in the early nineteenth century and formalized in the twentieth century by the Heckscher–Ohlin model, which explained trade patterns in terms of differences in factor endowments between countries. These models predicted that countries would trade with partners that were different from them in terms of technology or resource availability.

Krugman's key insight, articulated in a series of papers beginning in the late 1970s, was that a large portion of international trade—particularly trade among developed countries with similar economies—could not be explained by comparative advantage alone. Instead, he showed that economies of scale and consumer preferences for product variety could generate trade even between identical countries. By incorporating the tools of industrial organization, particularly models of monopolistic competition, into trade theory, Krugman provided a framework that could explain why, for example, Germany both exports and imports automobiles, or why countries with similar factor endowments trade extensively with one another. This work, published in journals including the American Economic Review and the Journal of International Economics, transformed the field of international economics.

Building on this foundation, Krugman made further contributions in the 1990s to what became known as new economic geography, a field that sought to explain why economic activity clusters in particular locations. Using models that incorporated increasing returns to scale, transportation costs, and factor mobility, Krugman demonstrated how the interaction of these forces could lead to the formation of economic agglomerations—cities, industrial belts, and core-periphery patterns in which manufacturing concentrates in some regions while others remain agricultural. His 1991 paper "Increasing Returns and Economic Geography" became one of the most cited articles in economics and effectively launched the field as a formal subdiscipline.

Krugman's academic work extended beyond trade and geography. He made significant contributions to the study of currency crises, developing models that explained how speculative attacks on fixed exchange rate regimes could be self-fulfilling. His work on liquidity traps—situations in which monetary policy becomes ineffective because interest rates are at or near zero—became particularly relevant during the Japanese economic stagnation of the 1990s and again during the Great Recession of 2007–2009.

Krugman served on the faculty at MIT from the late 1970s through 2000, with a brief period at Stanford University and a stint as a member of the Council of Economic Advisers during the Reagan administration in 1982–1983. In 2000, he moved to Princeton University, where he was appointed as a professor of economics and international affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. He remained at Princeton until his retirement in June 2015, after which he assumed his current position as Distinguished Professor of Economics at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He also holds the title of Centennial Professor at the London School of Economics.

In 2010, Krugman served as President of the Eastern Economic Association. He is consistently ranked among the most influential economists in the world according to the Research Papers in Economics (RePEc) rankings.

Books and Textbooks

Throughout his career, Krugman has been a prolific author. He has authored or edited 27 books spanning scholarly monographs, popular works, and widely used textbooks. His textbook International Economics: Theory and Policy, co-authored with Maurice Obstfeld (and later with Marc Melitz), has been a standard text in international economics courses at universities worldwide, contributing to his status as the second most frequently cited author on economics syllabi according to the Open Syllabus Project.

Among his works aimed at a general audience, Krugman's The Age of Diminished Expectations (1990) provided an accessible overview of the American economic landscape. Peddling Prosperity (1994) examined the influence of economic ideas on political policy. The Return of Depression Economics (1999, updated in 2008) argued that the kinds of economic crises that had afflicted developing countries could also strike advanced economies, a thesis that gained new resonance during the global financial crisis. The Conscience of a Liberal (2007) presented Krugman's analysis of the history of income inequality in the United States and his argument for a renewed commitment to the welfare state and progressive taxation. The book's title was also adopted for his blog on The New York Times website.

New York Times Column and Public Commentary

In 2000, Krugman began writing a twice-weekly opinion column for The New York Times, a position he would hold for nearly a quarter century. The column made Krugman one of the most prominent public intellectuals in the United States and gave him a platform to comment on economic policy, political developments, and public affairs that extended far beyond the academic world.

Krugman's commentary was characterized by its directness and its willingness to challenge prevailing political narratives. During the early 2000s, he was among the most prominent critics of the economic policies of the George W. Bush administration, particularly the Bush tax cuts and what he viewed as misleading claims about their fiscal effects. His columns during the Iraq War were also sharply critical. Following the 2008 financial crisis, Krugman became a forceful advocate for aggressive fiscal stimulus, arguing that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 was insufficient in scale and that premature fiscal austerity would impede economic recovery. His arguments drew on his academic work on liquidity traps and the economics of John Maynard Keynes.

Krugman considers himself a modern liberal and has described his political outlook in those terms. His popular commentary attracted both praise and criticism. Supporters credited him with making complex economic arguments accessible to a broad audience and with providing a consistent analytical framework for understanding policy debates. Critics, including some economists and political commentators, argued that his columns sometimes displayed partisan bias or oversimplified complex issues.

On December 6, 2024, New York Times opinion editor Kathleen Kingsbury announced that Krugman was retiring as a Times columnist. His final column, titled "Finding Hope in an Age of Resentment," was published on December 9, 2024. Krugman subsequently stated that he left the Times because his editors had begun to discourage him from writing columns that might "get some people (particularly on the right) riled up."

Substack Newsletter

Following his departure from The New York Times, Krugman launched a daily newsletter on Substack titled "Paul Krugman." The newsletter publishes most of its content for free while offering some exclusive items to paid subscribers. Krugman's wife, economist Robin Wells, serves as his editor for the newsletter. By mid-2025, the newsletter was reaching between 350,000 and 450,000 readers per post, establishing it as one of the more widely read publications on the Substack platform.

In his Substack writings, Krugman has continued to address a wide range of economic and political topics. His recent posts have covered subjects including U.S. tariff policy, the Russia–Ukraine war, Federal Reserve leadership, international trade agreements, and tax policy affecting wealthy individuals. His commentary has also addressed domestic political developments, including posts on democratic participation and political movements at the state level.

Personal Life

Krugman has been married twice. His second marriage, to economist Robin Wells, took place in 1996. Wells, who holds a PhD in economics, has collaborated with Krugman on several academic projects, including co-authoring economics textbooks. She also serves as his editor for his Substack newsletter.

Krugman has publicly identified his political views as those of a modern liberal, a label he has discussed in his 2007 book The Conscience of a Liberal and in his writings for The New York Times and Substack. He has lived in the New York metropolitan area for much of his professional career.

Recognition

Krugman's academic contributions have been recognized with numerous awards and honors. The most significant of these was the 2008 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, which he received as the sole laureate. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences cited his work on trade patterns and the geographic concentration of economic activity, noting that his models incorporated economies of scale and consumer preferences for diverse goods and services in ways that provided new explanatory power for observed patterns of international trade.

Prior to the Nobel Prize, Krugman received the John Bates Clark Medal in 1991, an award given by the American Economic Association to an American economist under the age of forty who has made significant contributions to economic thought and knowledge. At the time, the Clark Medal was awarded every two years and was considered one of the most prestigious prizes in economics.

A 2011 survey published by Econ Journal Watch found that economics professors named Krugman as their favorite living economist under the age of 60, a result that reflected both his academic influence and his public profile. His ranking in the Research Papers in Economics (RePEc) system, which measures scholarly impact through citations, downloads, and other metrics, has consistently placed him among the most influential economists worldwide.

Krugman served as President of the Eastern Economic Association in 2010, and his position as Centennial Professor at the London School of Economics reflects the international recognition of his contributions to the discipline.

Legacy

Krugman's contributions to economics have operated on two distinct but interconnected levels: the academic and the public. In academia, his development of new trade theory fundamentally changed how economists understand the drivers of international commerce. By demonstrating that economies of scale and product differentiation could explain trade patterns that classical models could not, Krugman helped bridge a gap between theoretical models and empirical observations that had long troubled the field. His subsequent work on new economic geography provided similarly influential frameworks for understanding the spatial distribution of economic activity. These contributions are reflected in his status as one of the most cited economists in the world and in the widespread adoption of his textbooks in university curricula.

As a public commentator, Krugman's nearly quarter-century at The New York Times established him as one of the most prominent voices in American economic and political debate. His columns reached a mass audience and brought academic economic reasoning to bear on policy questions in a manner that few other economists have achieved. His transition to Substack, where his newsletter quickly attracted hundreds of thousands of readers, demonstrated the continued demand for his analysis in an evolving media landscape.

Krugman's intellectual influence extends across multiple generations of economists. His academic work has been incorporated into standard graduate and undergraduate curricula, and his popular writings have shaped public understanding of issues ranging from trade policy and income inequality to fiscal stimulus and the limits of monetary policy. His more than 200 scholarly articles and 27 books constitute a body of work that spans both technical economics and accessible public engagement.

The tension between Krugman's roles as academic economist and political commentator has itself been a subject of discussion within the economics profession. Some observers have noted that his public profile has amplified the reach of economic ideas, while others have questioned whether the polemical style of his columns has complicated the reception of his scholarly contributions. Regardless of perspective, Krugman's dual career represents an unusual case in modern economics of sustained excellence in both academic research and public intellectual engagement.