William Barnett

William Barnett is a prominent economist in the field of Business & Economics, known for his pioneering contributions to macroeconomics, econometrics, and monetary theory. He holds a B.S. in engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, an M.B.A. from the University of California at Berkeley, and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in economics from Carnegie Mellon University. His distinguished career includes positions as an engineer at Rocketdyne developing the F-1 rocket engine, Research Economist at the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, Stuart Centennial Professor of Economics at the University of Texas at Austin, and Professor of Economics at Washington University in St. Louis from 1990 to 2002. Currently, he serves as the Charles W. Oswald Distinguished Professor of Macroeconomics at the University of Kansas and Director of the Center for Financial Stability in New York City. He is also a Fellow of the Institute for Applied Economics, Global Health, and the Study of Capitalism at Johns Hopkins University.

Barnett originated the Divisia monetary aggregates, revolutionizing monetary measurement and influencing central banks globally. His research focuses on financial economics, microeconomic foundations for macroeconomics, monetary asset demand modeling, index number theory extensions to risk, nonlinear dynamics, chaos tests, and semiparametric inference. He founded and was the first President of the Society for Economic Measurement, established the Cambridge University Press journal Macroeconomic Dynamics as Founding Editor, and edits the International Symposia in Economic Theory and Econometrics monograph series. Key publications include 'Economic Monetary Aggregates: An Application of Index Number and Aggregation Theory' (2000), 'The User Cost of Money' (1978), 'Consumer Theory and the Demand for Money' (1992, with D. Fisher and A. Serletis), 'A Single-Blind Controlled Competition Among Tests for Nonlinearity and Chaos' (1997), and 'Getting It Wrong: How Faulty Monetary Statistics Undermine the Fed, the Financial System, and the Economy' (MIT Press, 2011), which received the American Publishers Award for Professional and Scholarly Excellence. Among over 45 honors, he earned the John C. Wright Outstanding Graduate Mentor Award (2017) and Higuchi Research Award (2013). His innovations in aggregation theory and monetary policy simulation have profoundly shaped the discipline.