Alex Cukierman

Tel Aviv University and CEPR

Alex Cukierman is Professor of Economics at Tel - Aviv University and Research Fellow at CEPR. He got his Phd in Economics from MIT. Cukierman is author or co-author of four books and over a hundred scientific articles in the areas of macroeconomics, monetary economics, political economy and monetary policy and institutions. His best known book is: Central Bank Strategy, Credibility and Independence – Theory and Evidence, MIT Press,1992. He was a member, in 1998, of a governmental committee appointed to recommend reforms in the fifty year old Bank of Israel law.

A former president of the Israeli Economic Association Cukierman has been a Research Fellow at the Center for Economic Research at Tilburg University and a Visiting Professor or Scholar at Northwestern University, New York University, Carnegie Mellon University, Princeton University, the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, the World Bank, the University of Chicago, Stanford University, the University of Canterbury and the University of California at Santa Cruz. He is currently a visiting research fellow at the ECB.

During the early eighties he applied Lucas’ “aggregate - relative” confusion to develop a deeper understanding of relative price variability and of the distributions of inflation and of inflationary expectations. This effort culminated in the book: Inflation, Stagflation, Relative Prices and Imperfect Information, Cambridge University Press, 1984. He also has worked on the interaction between politics and fiscal policy and on the consequences of asymmetric information in political economy as examplified by the (joint with M. Tommasi) 1998 AER paper: "When does it take a Nixon to go to China?"

Recent work dealt with central bank independence and inflation in transition economies and the tradeoff between credibility and flexibility in the context of choice of exchange rate regime in the presence and in the absence of currency attacks. Current work focusses on strategic interactions between fiscal policy, labor market institutions and monetary policymaking institutions in the presence of labor unions, consequences of such strategic interactions for monetary unions, tests and consequences of non linear Taylor rules, transparency in monetary policy and the impact of wars on redistribution.