Rudi Dornbusch


Rüdiger "Rudi" Dornbusch was a German economist who worked for most of his career in the United States.

Biography

Dornbusch was born in Krefeld in present-day North Rhine-Westphalia. After completing his secondary education at the Gymnasium am Moltkeplatz in Krefeld, he went to study abroad. He received his Licence en Sciences Politiques from the University of Geneva in 1966, where he also stayed on for a year as an assistant in Economics in the Graduate Institute of International Studies, and subsequently moved to the United States, where he obtained his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Chicago. He also briefly worked as a lecturer in the Graduate School of Business at the University of Chicago. For two years he stayed at the University of Rochester as an assistant professor in the Department of Economics, followed by a year as associate professor of International Economics, again in the Graduate School of Business of the University of Chicago. In 1975 he moved to MIT, where he was appointed as associate professor in the Department of Economics. In 1984 he became professor of economics. He stayed at MIT until his death in 2002.
Throughout his career his main focus was on international economics, especially monetary policy, macroeconomic development, growth and international trade. According to some of his students and associates his talent was to extract the heart of a problem and make it understandable in simple terms. For example, he explained fluctuations in prices and exchange rates with great clarity. He succeeded in making a more realistic model than Mundell-Fleming model with regard to a small open economic system, considering exchange rate expectations. He worked also for the International Monetary Fund, making controversial contributions to the development of stabilisation policies, especially for Latin American countries. Along with Sebastian Edwards coined the term macroeconomic populism. For more than 15 years he served as an associate editor of the Quarterly Journal of Economics.
Together with Stanley Fischer he also wrote widely used undergraduate textbooks.
He died, aged sixty, from cancer.

Major works