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Professor Robert A. Mundell

Professor Robert A. Mundell was born in 1932. After graduating from the University of British Columbia in Economics and Slavonic Studies, he studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and London School of Economics, receiving his PhD from MIT in 1956. He was Post-Doctoral Fellow in Political Economy at the University of Chicago in 1956-57 and taught at Stanford University and The Johns Hopkins Bologna Center of Advanced International Studies before joining the International Monetary Fund in 1961. From 1966 to 1971, he was Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago and Editor of the Journal of Political Economy. Since 1974, he has been Professor of Economics and since 2001, University Professor at Columbia University in New York.

Professor Mundell has been an adviser to a number of international agencies and organizations including the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the European Commission, and several governments in Latin America, Africa, Asia and Europe, the Federal Reserve Board, the US Treasury and the Government of Canada.

Professor Mundell’s writings include over a hundred articles in scientific journals and books. He prepared one of the first plans for a common currency in Europe and is known as the father of the theory of optimum currency areas. He has also written extensively on the history of the international monetary system and played an early role in the founding of the Euro.

Professor Mundell has received over fifty Honorary Professorships and Doctorates. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Science, a Distinguished Fellow Award of the American Economic Association, past presidents of the North American Economic and Financial Association and the International Atlantic Economic Society. He received the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 1999 for “his analysis of monetary and fiscal policy under different exchange rate regimes and his analysis of optimum currency areas”. In 1999, he was appointed Companion of the Order of Canada and in 2005 was awarded the Global Economics Award of the Kiel Institute, Germany, and appointed Knight Grand Cross of the Royal Order of Merit.