About Paul Krugman
Paul Robin Krugman ( KRUUG-mən; born February 28, 1953) is an American economist who is the Distinguished Professor of Economics at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He was a columnist for The New York Times from 2000 to 2024. In 2008, Krugman was the sole winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his contributions to new trade theory and new economic geography. The Prize Committee cited Krugman's work explaining the patterns of international trade and the geographic distribution of economic activity, by examining the effects of economies of scale and of consumer preferences for diverse goods and services. Krugman was previously a professor of economics at MIT, and later, at Princeton University from where he retired in June 2015, holding the title of professor emeritus there. He also holds the title of Centennial Professor at the London School of Economics. Krugman was President of the Eastern Economic Association in 2010, and is among the most influential economists in the world. He is known in academia for his work on international economics (including trade theory and international finance), economic geography, liquidity traps, and currency crises. Krugman is the author or editor of 27 books, including scholarly works, textbooks, and books for a more general audience, and has published more than 200 scholarly articles in professional journals and edited volumes. He has also written several hundred columns on economic and political issues for The New York Times, Fortune and Slate. A 2011 survey of economics professors named him their favorite living economist under the age of 60. According to the Open Syllabus Project, Krugman is the second most frequently cited author on college syllabi for economics courses. As a commentator, Krugman has written on a wide range of economic issues including income distribution, taxation, macroeconomics, and international economics. Krugman considers himself a modern liberal, referring to his books, his blog on The New York Times, and his 2007 book The Conscience of a Liberal. His popular commentary has attracted widespread praise and criticism. On December 6, 2024, New York Times opinion editor Kathleen Kingsbury announced that Krugman was retiring as a Times columnist; His final column, titled 'Finding Hope in an Age of Resentment,' was published on December 9, 2024. Afterwards, Krugman began publishing a daily newsletter on Substack. The newsletter, titled "Paul Krugman," publishes most content for free while offering a longer weekly tutorial post to paid subscribers. Krugman's wife, economist Robin Wells, serves as his editor for the newsletter. By mid-2025, the newsletter was reaching 350,000-450,000 readers per post. Krugman wrote there that he left the Times because his editors began to discourage him from writing columns that might "get some people (particularly on the right) riled up." He is also co-author, with Robin Wells, of an undergraduate economics text which he says was strongly inspired by the first edition of Paul Samuelson's classic textbook. The "home market effect" that Krugman discovered in NTT also features in NEG, which interprets agglomeration "as the outcome of the interaction of increasing returns, trade costs and factor price differences". Krugman's paper is considered one of the main contributions to the 'first generation' of currency crisis models, and it is his second-most-cited paper (457 citations as of early 2009).
Biography source: Wikipedia. The profile adds birthday-specific historical context from the Celebs Birthday Today editorial database.