Narayana Kocherlakota
- President, Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, 2009–2015
Narayana Kocherlakota was the twelfth president and chief executive officer of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis from October 8, 2009, through December 31, 2015.
Kocherlakota was born in Baltimore, Maryland, but lived in Winnipeg, Manitoba, for most of his childhood. He entered Princeton at age fifteen and graduated four years later with a bachelor’s degree in mathematics. He received his doctorate in economics from the University of Chicago in 1987 on the topic of pricing financial assets, incorporating new kinds of consumer preferences and analyzing how risky payoffs influence attitudes.
Before his appointment as president, Kocherlakota served as a member of the Minneapolis Fed’s Research staff, as well as a Research consultant for the Reserve Bank. His prior experience also includes professorships at the University of Minnesota, where he was chair of the economics department, and at Stanford University, as well as other positions at Northwestern University and the University of Iowa. He was also a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research.
Kocherlakota has published more than thirty articles in academic journals on a variety of topics, including monetary and financial economics. In 2010, Princeton University Press published his book The New Dynamic Public Finance, which focuses on an approach to tax design pioneered by him and others over the past decade.
But Kocherlakota is not interested in economic research merely in academia. Shortly after becoming president, he wrote, in the Minneapolis Fed’s Region magazine, “I view a huge part of my job as translating my lessons both into plain language and into concrete policy decisions. At the same time, I want to communicate in the other direction. Currently, the Federal Reserve System and other parts of the US government are facing critical policy decisions. I view a key part of my job to be setting these policy problems before our research staff and the academic macro community as a whole.” 1
Kocherlakota was named one of the top 100 Global Thinkers by Foreign Policy magazine in 2012.
Written by the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. See disclaimer.
