Council of Economic Advisers

Members of the Council of Economic Advisers

Alan B. Krueger

Image of Alan B. Krueger Alan B. Krueger is the Chairman of President Barack Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers and a member of the Cabinet.  Mr. Krueger was confirmed by the U.S. Senate on November 3, 2011.  Previously, Mr. Krueger served in the Obama Administration as Assistant Secretary for Economic Policy and Chief Economist at the U.S. Department of the Treasury. 

He is currently on leave from Princeton University, where he is the Bendheim Professor of Economics and Public Affairs. He has held a joint appointment in the Economics Department and the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton since 1987. In 1994-95, Mr. Krueger served as Chief Economist at the U.S. Department of Labor.

A labor economist, Krueger has published widely on unemployment, the economics of education, unemployment, income distribution, social insurance, regulation, terrorism, finance and the environment. He has been a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, a member of the editorial board of Science, and has served as chief economist for the Council for Economic Education. He is the author of What Makes A Terrorist: Economics and the Roots of Terrorism and Education Matters: A Selection of Essays on Education, and co-author of Myth and Measurement: The New Economics of the Minimum Wage and of Inequality in America: What Role for Human Capital Policies?

Prior to assuming his current position, Mr. Krueger was a member of the Board of Directors of the MacArthur Foundation and the Center for Economic Research and Graduate Education at Charles University in the Czech Republic, and a senior scientist for the Gallup Organization.  He was named a Sloan Fellow in Economics in 1992 and an NBER Olin Fellow in 1989-90. He was elected a Fellow of the Econometric Society in 1996, a Fellow of the Society of Labor Economists in 2005 and a member of the Executive Committee of the American Economic Association in 2004.  He was awarded the Kershaw Prize by the Association for Public Policy and Management in 1997 and the Mahalanobis Memorial Medal by the Indian Econometric Society in 2001.  In 2002, he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, and in 2003 he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Political and Social Science.  He was awarded the IZA Prize in Labor Economics with David Card in 2006.  From March 2000 to February 2009, he was a regular contributor to the "Economic Scene" and Economix blog in The New York Times.

Alan Krueger received a B.S. degree, with honors, from Cornell University’s School of Industrial & Labor Relations in 1983, an A.M. in Economics from Harvard University in 1985, and a Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard University in 1987.  

 Katharine G. Abraham

Picture of Dr. Katharine G. Abraham -- Member of the Council of Economic AdvisersKatharine G. Abraham is a member of the Council of Economic Advisers and is responsible for offering the President objective advice on the formulation of economic policy.  Abraham is currently on leave from the University of Maryland, where she is a faculty associate in the Maryland Population Research Center and a professor in the Joint Program in Survey Methodology.

Abraham’s research has included work on employment and unemployment, labor market policy and the measurement of economic activity.

Nominated by President William J. Clinton, Abraham served as Commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics from 1993-2001.  Prior to that, she held appointments in the Department of Economics, University of Maryland; the Brookings Institution; and the Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  She is a Fellow of the Society of Labor Economists and of the American Statistical Association; holds an honorary doctorate from Iowa State University; and is a past Vice-President of the American Economic Association.

Dr. Abraham earned her B.S. in Economics from Iowa State University in 1976 and her Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard University in 1982.

 Carl Shapiro

Picture of Carl Shapiro -- Member of the Council of Economic AdvisersCarl Shapiro is a member of the Council of Economic Advisers.  Shapiro is on leave from the University of California at Berkeley, where he is the Transamerica Professor of Business Strategy at the Haas School of Business and Professor of Economics in the Department of Economics.

Shapiro has published extensively in the areas of industrial organization, competition policy, the economics of innovation, and competitive strategy.  He is co-author of the 1999 book,  Information Rules: A Strategic Guide to the Network Economy.

Shapiro is a former Alfred P. Sloan Fellow and Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences.  He was the founding Co-Editor and then Editor of the Journal of Economic Perspectives.  Shapiro was Director of the Institute of Business and Economic Research at UC Berkeley from 1998-2008.

Shapiro served from 2009-2011 as Deputy Assistant Attorney General for Economics at the Antitrust Division of the United States Department of Justice, where he supervised more than fifty Ph.D. economists in the Antitrust Division’s Economic Analysis Group.  He earned his Ph.D. in Economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1981.