Robert Joseph Barro (born September 28, 1944) is an American macroeconomist and the Paul M. Warburg Professor of Economics at Harvard University. Barro is considered one of the founders of new classical macroeconomics, along with Robert Lucas, Jr. and Thomas J. Sargent. He is currently a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution and co-editor of the influential Quarterly Journal of Economics. Academic career Barro graduated with a B.S. in physics from the California Institute of Technology in 1965, where he learned under Richard Feynman, but he realized he "wouldn't be close to the top in those fields." He then turned to economics and earned a PhD from Harvard University in 1970. He first reached wide notice with a 1974 paper, "Are Government Bonds Net Wealth?" It argued that under certain assumptions, present governmental borrowing would be matched by increased bequests to future generations to pay future taxes expected to pay down the government bonds; thus a lowering of current taxes, financed by the issuance of government bonds, would have no effect on the public's spending on consumer goods. The paper was in direct response to Alan Blinder and Robert Solow's results, which had implied that the long term implications of government borrowing would be compensated for by the wealth effect. The paper is among the most cited in macroeconomics. Its implications of his Ricardian equivalence are still being debated. Barro collaborated with Herschel Grossman to produce the influential 1971 article "A General Disequilibrium Model of Income and Employment," which for many years held the distinction of being the most cited article published in the American Economic Review. The article explored the idea that disequilibrium in one market can have spillover effects to another market, creating a distinction between notional demand and effective demand. Barro and Grossman expanded on their work and produced the classic textbook Money, Employment, and Inflation in 1976. In 1976, he authored another influential paper, "Rational expectations and the role of monetary policy" in which he argued that information asymmetries would cause real effects as rational economic actors in response to uncertainty but not in response to expected monetary policy changes. In it and other essays, he investigated the real effects of monetary changes through which he could significantly contribute to the clarification of the exact circumstances of the validity of the policy-ineffectiveness proposition. While he has revisited the topic since then and critically appraised the