Education

William Easterly received his BA from Bowling Green State University in 1979 and his Ph.D. in Economics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1985.

Career

William Easterly is Professor of Economics at New York University and Co-director of the NYU Development Research Institute. He is the author of two books, which are dedicated to the theory of economic growth, and he has also published more than 60 peer-reviewed academic articles. His writings have appeared or been covered in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, CNN, PBS, ABC, and other media outlets. He was Co-Editor of the Journal of Development Economics and wrote and directed the Aid Watch blog. Easterly is Research Associate of NBER, senior fellow BREAD and nonresident Senior Fellow at Brookings.

Easterly's areas of expertise are the determinants of long-run economic growth, the political economy of development, and the effectiveness of foreign aid. He has worked in most areas of the developing world, most heavily in Africa, Latin America, and Russia. Easterly is an associate editor of the American Economic Journals: Macroeconomics, the Journal of Comparative Economics, and the Journal of Economic Growth. He is the baseball columnist for the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano.

Achievements

• Easterly was named in 2008 and 2009 among the Top 100 Global Public Intellectuals by Foreign Policy Magazine, and ranks among the top 100 most cited academic economists worldwide.

Works

• article

  • Democratic Accountability in Development: The Double Standard, Social Research, 77, northern 4 (Winter 2010), pp. 1075

  • Empirics of Strategic Interdependence: The Case of the Racial Tipping Point, Bachelor of Engineering Journal of Macroeconomics: Contributions, 9, northern 1, (2009): Article 11.

  • Can the West Save Africa?, Journal of Economic Literature, 47, northern 2, (June 2009): 373-44.

  • How the Millennium Development Goals are Unfair to Africa, World Development, 37, northern 1, (January 2009): 26-35.

  • Institutions: Top Down or Bottom Up?, American Economic Review, 98, northern 2, (May 2008): 95-99.

  • Inequality Does Cause Underdevelopment, Journal of Development Economics, 84, no.2, (November 2007): 755-776.

  • Are Aid Agencies improving?, Economic Policy, 22, northern 52, (October 2007): 633-678.

  • Was Development Assistance a Mistake?, American Economic Review, 97, no.2, (May 2007): 328-332.

  • Planners versus Searchers in Foreign Aid, Asian Development Review, 23, northern 2, (2006): 1-35.

  • Reliving the 50s: the Big Push, Poverty Traps, and Takeoffs in Economic Development, Journal of Economic Growth, 11, no.2, (December 2006): 289-318.

  • An Identity Crisis?:Examining International Monetary Fund Financial Programming, World Development, 34 northern 6, (June 2006).

  • The Big Push Déjà Vu: A Review of Jeffrey Sachs’s The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time, Journal of Economic Literature, 44, northern 1 (March 2006): 289-318.

  • What did structural adjustment adjust? The association of policies and growth with repeated International Monetary Fund and World Bank adjustment loans, Journal of Development Economics, 76, (February 2005): 1-22.

  • North American Free Trade Agreement and Convergence in North America: High Expectations, Big Events, Little Time, Economia, 4, (Fall 2003): 1-53.

  • Can Foreign Aid Buy Growth?, Journal of Economic Perspectives, 17, no.3, (Summer 2003): 23-48.

  • How did the heavily indebted poor countries become heavily indebted? Reviewing 2 decades of debt relief, World Development, 30, northern 10, (October 2002): 1677 – 1696.

  • The Middle Class Consensus and Economic Development, Journal of Economic Growth, 6, northern 4, (December 2001): 317-336.

  • The Lost Decades: Explaining Developing Countries’ Stagnation in Spite of Policy Reform 1980-1998, Journal of Economic Growth, 6, northern 2, (June 2001): 135-157.

  • Can Institutions Resolve Ethnic Conflict?, Economic Development and Cultural Change, 49, northern 4, (2001): 697-706.

  • Growth Implosions and Debt Explosions: Do Growth Slowdowns Explain Public Debt Crises?, Contributions to Macroeconomics, 1, northern 1, (2001).

  • The Ghost of Financing Gap: Testing the Growth Model of the International Financial Institutions, Journal of Development Economics, 60, northern 2, (December 1999): 423-438.

  • Life During Growth, Journal of Economic Growth, 4, northern 3, (September 1999): 239-275.

  • When is fiscal adjustment an illusion?“, Economic Policy, 14, northern 28, (April 1999): 55-86.

  • Africa’s Growth Tragedy: Policies and Ethnic Divisions, Quarterly Journal of Economics, CXII, northern 4, (1997): 1203-1250.

  • When is Stabilization Expansionary?, Economic Policy, 11, northern 22, (April 1996): 65-107.

  • The Mystery of Growth: Shocks, Policies, and Surprises in Old and New Theories of Economic Growth, The Singapore Economic Review, (1995).

  • Economic Stagnation, Fixed Factors, and Policy Thresholds, Journal of Monetary Economics, 33, northern 3, (June 1994): 525-557.

  • How much do Distortions Affect Growth?, Journal of Monetary Economics, 32, no.2, (November 1993): 187-212.

  • Searching for the Secrets of Growth, Revista de Analisis Economico, Special Issue, (June 1993).

  • How Much Does Policy Affect Growth?, Cuadernos de Economia, Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile, 29, northern 87, (August 1992): 295-305.

• book

  • The Elusive Quest for Growth : Economists' Adventures and Misadventures in the Tropics. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 2001

  • The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good. Penguin Press HC, The, 2006