Presidential Young Investigator Award

该奖项在国家科学基金会总统青年研究者奖励计划下为Christina Romer博士提供支持。该计划的目标是为全国最杰出和最有前途的年轻科学和工程教师提供研究支持。该奖项旨在提高美国学术机构的能力，以满足学术和工业研究和教学对高素质科学和工程人员的需求。该奖项将允许研究者继续她系统地将现代宏观经济学与经济史联系起来的研究。她的主要研究成果之一是挑战了用于分析战前商业周期的数据。在20世纪60年代和70年代，经济学家倾向于将战前对国民生产总值或失业率等指标的估计与现代估计相比较。然后，他们用这些数据证明，从20世纪初到最近的时代，商业周期变得不那么严重了。罗默博士的研究直接反驳了这一被广泛接受的发现，表明战前对大多数主要经济健康指标的估计是以一种强调战前周期的方式构建的。当这些偏差被消除后，新的战前估计表明，大萧条前后的周期的严重程度大致相同。因此，通过以一致的方式衡量产出，她发现，战前和战后的差异很大程度上是因为后一时期有了更好的衡量数据基础。这一发现很重要，因为它推翻了货币经济学家（如诺贝尔经济学奖得主米尔顿·弗里德曼）和凯恩斯主义经济学家（如诺贝尔经济学奖得主詹姆斯·托宾和佛朗哥·莫迪利亚尼）所使用的关键观察结果，这些观察结果强烈支持他们各自的理论。现在，她提出了另一个挑战，这次挑战的是人们对宏观经济的普遍看法，即货币的变动会导致实际产出的变动。这项研究包括调查战前时期货币供应中特别戏剧性的变动与实体经济行为之间是否存在可识别的统计关系，以及对历史记录的仔细检查，以确定与金融恐慌相关的大规模货币流动是否应被视为外生事件，还是由金融危机引发的内生运动抑郁症的早期状态。罗默博士激发了人们对美国经济演变的新兴趣，她将继续成为重新解释美国经济的主要贡献者。虽然过去的证据经常被用来说明或说明，但罗默博士的研究因其历史分析的深度及其在提出有能力重塑宏观经济理论的相关假设方面的应用而与众不同。

This award provides support to Dr. Christina Romer under the National Science Foundation's Presidential Young Investigator Awards Program. The objectives of this program are to provide research support to the Nation's most outstanding and promising young science and engineering faculty. The awards are intended to improve the capability of U.S. academic institutions to respond to the demand for highly qualified science and engineering personnel for academic and industrial research and teaching. This award will allow the investigator to pursue her research which systematically links modern macroeconomics with economic history. One of her major research accomplishments has been to challenge the data used to analyze prewar business cycles. In the 1960s and 1970s, economists tended to view prewar estimates of such indicators as gross national product or the unemployment rate as comparable with modern estimates. They then used these data to argue that business cycles had gotten much less severe between the early 20th century and the more recent era. Dr. Romer's work directly contradicted this widely accepted finding by showing that the prewar estimates of most major indicators of economic health were constructed in a way that accentuated prewar cycles. When these biases were removed, the new prewar estimates showed that cycles before and after the Great Depression were of roughly equal severity. Thus, by measuring output in a consistent way, she found that much of the pre- and post-war difference was the result of a better data base for measurement in the latter period. This finding is important for it overthrows the key observation used by both monetary economists, e.g., Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman, and Keynesian economists, e.g., Nobel Laureates James Tobin and Franco Modigliani, as being strongly supportive of their respective theories. Now, she proposes another challenge, this time to the widely held belief about the macroeconomy that movements in money cause movements in real output. This research involves investigating whether there is in fact an identifiable statistical relationship between particularly dramatic movements in the supply of money in the prewar era and the behavior of the real economy and the close examination of the historical record to see if the large movements of money associated with financial panics should be viewed as exogenous events or as endogenous movements triggered by the early states of a depression. Dr. Romer has stimulated a new interest in the evolution of the American economy and she will continue to be a major contributor to reinterpretations of it. While evidence from the past has often been used to illustrate or illuminate, Dr. Romer's research is differentiated by the depth of the historical analysis and its use in posing relevant hypotheses that have the power to reshape macroeconomic theory.