Emi Nakamura wins the John Bates Clark medal

Putting the macroeconomy under the microscope

The year 2007, when Emi Nakamura earned her phd, was a strange one for her chosen discipline of macroeconomics. It marked a turning point between complacent consensus and humiliating division. Pre-crisis macroeconomics had such strong faith in the stabilising power of monetary policy that it neglected the dangers of financial shocks and the merits of fiscal stimulus. Like joining the cavalry in 1914, it was presumably a bad time to be entering the profession.

Not a bit of it. “I think it was a good time,” says Ms Nakamura, who now works at the University of California, Berkeley, and this week won the John Bates Clark medal for the best economist aged under 40 in America. “Macroeconomics”, she points out, “is a countercyclical field.”