Olivier Blanchard becomes IMF's Research Head

IMF Survey online: What's your background and what attracted you to the Fund?

On where I come from: I crossed the ocean from France in 1973 to start a PhD in economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). I intended to specialize in development but, soon after I arrived, I realized development economics, as a field, was barely alive, and the action was in macroeconomics.

I shifted, and wrote my thesis under Stan Fischer and Bob Solow. I have been working on macroeconomics ever since, at Harvard from 1977 to 1982, and at MIT since then. I still have very much of an interest in the macroeconomics of low-income countries, and I look forward to engaging with the issues faced by the low-income members of the IMF.

On why I came to the IMF: What has always turned me on most is to look at a complex set of facts, find a conceptual structure to make sense of it, write down a simple formal model which captures it, and then see where it takes me, policy implications and all.

I remember the thrill of going on trips with Rudi Dornbusch in the early 1980s, being exposed to an avalanche of facts, and then seeing Rudi make sense of it all, often demolishing received wisdom (and some of its high priests) in the process. I had the same thrill later, when looking at transition in Eastern Europe, or unemployment in Western Europe, or Chinese macroeconomic policy.

For somebody with my preferences, this job is, in many ways, a dream job. Think about how complex the current crisis is, and the challenge of making sense of it all. I am not sure I can. Indeed, I am not sure anybody can. But it is sure fun to try. And, maybe, in doing so, help make the world economy a better place.