Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas

Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas

Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas is the Economic Counsellor and the Director of Research of the IMF. He is on leave from the University of California at Berkeley where he is the S.K. and Angela Chan Professor of Global Management in the Department of Economics and at the Haas School of Business. Professor Gourinchas was the editor-in-chief of the IMF Economic Review from its creation in 2009 to 2016, the managing editor of the Journal of International Economics between 2017 and 2019, and a co-editor of the American Economic Review between 2019 and 2022. He is on-leave from the National Bureau of Economic Research where he was director of the International Finance and Macroeconomics program, a Research Fellow with the Center for Economic Policy Research CEPR (London) and a Fellow of the Econometric Society.

Professor Gourinchas' main research interests are in international macroeconomics and finance. His recent research focuses on the scarcity of global safe assets, global imbalances and currency wars; on the International Monetary System and the role of the U.S. dollar; on the Dominant Currency Paradigm; on the determinants of capital flows to and from developing countries; on international portfolios; on the global financial crisis and on the impact of the COVID-19 crisis on business failures. Professor Gourinchas is the laureate of the 2007 Bernácer Prize for best European economist working in macroeconomics and finance under the age of 40, and of the 2008 Prix du Meilleur Jeune Economiste for best French economist under the age of 40. In 2012-2013, Professor Gourinchas was a member of the French Council of Economic Advisors to the Prime Minister.

He attended Ecole Polytechnique and received his PhD in Economics in 1996 from MIT. He taught at Stanford Graduate School of Business and Princeton University before joining UC Berkeley department of economics in 2003. He grew up in Montpellier, France.

Last updated: February 8, 2022