Chief Economist Austan Goolsbee

Austan Goolsbee is the chief economist for the President’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board. He is also the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers and a member of the Cabinet.

Goolsbee is on leave from the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, where he researched tax policy, American industry, technology and innovation as the Robert P. Gwinn Professor of Economics. He was an economic adviser to Obama’s 2004 Senate campaign before serving as a senior economic adviser to Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign.

Prior to joining the Obama Administration, Goolsbee was a member of the Panel of Economic Advisers to the Congressional Budget Office, a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and a research fellow at the American Bar Foundation. He was also a member of the U.S. Census Advisory Committee.

Goolsbee is a former Fulbright Scholar and Alfred P. Sloan Fellow. He was selected as one of The Financial Times’ six “Gurus of the Future”/Best under 40 (2005) and named a Young Global Leader at the 2005 World Economic Forum. An economics columnist for Slate and The New York Times, Goolsbee was awarded the 2006 Peter Lisagor Award for Exemplary Journalism.

Goolsbee earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in economics from Yale University in 1991 and his Ph.D in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1995.