Economics Professor Emmanuel Farhi Awarded Tenure

Economics Professor Emmanuel Farhi, who focuses on macroeconomics, was awarded tenure by University President Drew G. Faust yesterday. His appointment follows Faust’s late April announcement that Economics Professor Gita Gopinath, who studies international economics, would also receive tenure for next year.

The two professors, both under 40 years of age, will increase the vitality of the department, according to Department Chair John Y. Campbell.

“The quality of any department depends on the vitality of the faculty”, Campbell said.  “When you have the opportunity to offer a junior faculty member tenure, you have the chance to improve that vitality.”

Offers of tenure at other universities for each of the professors prompted the department, which had noted each professor’s research work, to offer tenure to Farhi and Gopinath, Campbell said.

Farhi is currently weighing his options between tenured positions at Princeton and the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and Gopinath is reviewing offers of tenure from Yale College and Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Both professors were tenure-track faculty at Harvard, so the department thought this time would be an appropriate time to react, Campbell said.

Gopinath’s current work looks at data that was previously kept from the public domain, reviewing detailed numbers that calculate aggregate price indices­—the first type of academic research in this area, according to Gopinath.

“For the longest time, we’ve been looking at aggregate price data, but we wanted to look at micro-data that are used to put together the aggregate price data,” said Gopinath, who plans to return to her previous research on the functioning of debt overhang economies and apply her findings to Greece’s current debt-heavy financial situation.

Farhi—who concentrates on macroeconomics in various types of finance—is currently reviewing social insurance policy and examining the reasons for the contrast of trade deficits in developed countries and trade surpluses in developing nations, he said.

This examination will lead to Farhi’s new intermediate level class next year, “Macroeconomic Policy in the Global Economy,” which will develop simple models to determine the effects of the “large macro problems that we face today about the [American] and European debt crises,” Fahri said.

­­—Staff writer Gautam S. Kumar can be reached at gkumar@college.harvard.edu