Paul Evans

Paul Evans is Professor of Economics at Ohio State University. He has received an BS degree from MIT and an MS and PhD degrees from the University of Chicago. He has taught at Stanford University, the University of Houston and Ohio State University and has been a Visiting Scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco and the Institute of Social and Economic Research at Osaka University. He is a coeditor of the Journal of Money, Credit and Banking and is on the Board of Editors of Studies in Economics and Finance and theJournal of Financial Stability. He has published over 60 articles in scholarly journals on a wide range of topics in Macroeconomics.

Throughout his career, Paul Evans has used econometrics to address questions in macroeconomics.  Early on, he investigated the effects of monetary policy on inflation and output. In the 1980s, his research largely focused on measuring the effects of budget deficits on aggregate demand and hence on such variables as consumption, capital formation, interest rates, exchange rates, and trade balances. The resulting articles found little, if any, evidence of substantial effects. He interpreted this finding as supporting the Ricardian Equivalence Theorem, which states that government debt is equivalent to current taxation under some rather restrictive assumptions. He also showed that Ricardian equivalence may be a good approximation even if these restrictive assumptions are violated. In the past few years, he has attempted to evaluate growth theories empirically, finding little support for those that predict appreciable endogeneity of growth rates either across countries or over time.