Mitchener, Kris

Kris James Mitchener is the Robert and Susan Finocchio Professor of Economics at Santa Clara University, Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) and the Centre for Competitive Advantage and the Global Economy (CAGE), and Research Fellow at the Centre for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) and CESifo. In 2021-22, Professor Mitchener will be a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University.

His research focuses on economic history, international economics, macroeconomics, and political economy. He is a leading expert on the history of financial crises. His path-breaking research on the Great Depression demonstrates how the size of credit booms influences the severity of the economic downturns and how financial networks propagate and amplify the real effects of banking crises. His current research in international macroeconomics analyzes how commodity-price shocks affect countries' commitments to pegged exchange rates as well as the effects of monetary policy shocks on output and inflation. In political economy, he is working on understanding how financial instruments can be designed to reduce conflict and enable political and economic modernization, as was the case with the issuance of samurai bonds in Meiji Japan.

Professor Mitchener's is also a leading expert on sovereign debt. His forthcoming book entitled In Defense of Public Debt recounts two millennia of public debt history, connecting the present challenges of debt-management in advanced economies to those of the past, and showing how economies climbed out from under mountains of debt.. Prior to his current position, he was professor of economics at the University of Warwick, and from 2009-11, he was the W. Glenn Campbell and Rita-Ricardo Campbell Hoover National Fellow at Stanford University. He has held visiting positions at the Bank of Japan, the Federal Reserve Banks of St. Louis and San Francisco, UCLA, Waseda University, Queens University (Canada), and CREi at Universitat Pompeu Fabra. He served as editor of Explorations in Economic History from 2015-2020, and presently serves on the boards of the Financial History Review and Cambridge University Press. He received his B.A. and Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley.