Rate My Professor Pascal Michaillat

Pascal Michaillat is a professor of economics at the University of California, Santa Cruz, contributing to the Business & Economics faculty. He joined UC Santa Cruz as an associate professor in 2023 and was promoted to full professor in 2025. Prior to this, he held positions at Brown University as assistant professor from 2016 to 2019 and associate professor from 2019 to 2023, and as lecturer in economics at the London School of Economics from 2010 to 2016. His academic journey includes a PhD in Economics from the University of California, Berkeley in 2010, an MS in Industrial Engineering and Operations Research from the same institution in 2005, and an Ingénieur des Arts et Manufactures degree from École Centrale Paris in 2005.

Michaillat's research focuses on economic slack, with a particular emphasis on unemployment, intersecting macroeconomics, public economics, and labor economics. He is affiliated with the National Bureau of Economic Research as a research associate in Public Economics and Monetary Economics since 2017, and with the Centre for Economic Policy Research as a research fellow in Labor Economics and Monetary Economics since 2011. Notable publications include "Aggregate Demand, Idle Time, and Unemployment" with Emmanuel Saez in the Quarterly Journal of Economics (2015), "A Macroeconomic Approach to Optimal Unemployment Insurance: Theory" and its companion "Applications" with Camille Landais and Emmanuel Saez in the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy (2018), "Optimal Public Expenditure with Inefficient Unemployment" with Emmanuel Saez in the Review of Economic Studies (2019), and recent works such as "u∗ = √uv: The Full-Employment Rate of Unemployment in the United States" with Emmanuel Saez in the Brookings Papers on Economic Activity (2024) and "Has the Recession Started?" with Emmanuel Saez in the Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics (2025). He has a book under contract with Princeton University Press titled "A Theory of Slack: How Economic Slack Shapes Markets, Business Cycles, and Policies." Awards and grants include the Upjohn Institute Dissertation Award (2010), ESRC Future Research Leaders Grant (2013–2016), and Institute for New Economic Thinking Research Grant (2014–2017). Michaillat teaches courses such as Economic Slack and Unemployment at the graduate level and Intermediate Macroeconomics at the undergraduate level. He also serves on the arXiv Editorial Committee for Economics since 2019.