Pavlina R. Tcherneva

Economist, Author, and Speaker

Pavlina R. Tcherneva, Ph.D., is President of the Levy Economics Institute, Professor of Economics at Bard College, and Director of OSUN’s Economic Democracy Initiative, NY.  She is a macroeconomist specializing in monetary economics and stabilization policy.

Her book The Case for a Job Guarantee (2020) is the ultimate guide to the benefits of one of the most transformative public policies being discussed today. It was named one of the Financial Times best economics books of 2020 and has been published in eight languages. Her early work assessed Argentina’s adoption of a similar large-scale job creation proposal she had developed with colleagues in the United States. Tcherneva has collaborated with experts from the United Nations Human Rights Council, the International Labor Organization, members of the European Parliament, as well as policy makers from the United States and abroad on designing and evaluating employment programs. She also worked with the Sanders 2016 Presidential campaign after her research on inequality had garnered national attention. In 2020, she was invited to serve on the Biden-Harris economic policy volunteer committee, during their Presidential run.

Tcherneva’s areas of research include monetary and fiscal policy coordination, the Bernanke doctrine, and policy responses during the Great Financial Crisis and the COVID-19 economic shock. She frequently speaks at central banks, professional associations, non-profit institutions, and community groups on topics ranging from modern money theory and economic (in)security to inequality and job creation.

Her first book Full Employment and Price Stability (2004), co-edited with M. Forstater, is a rare collection of the lesser-known works by Nobel Prize–winning economist William Vickrey on employment and inflation, and reinterprets his proposals for the modern day.

In 2006, she was a visiting scholar at the University of Cambridge, U.K., where she immersed herself in J.M. Keynes’s collected writings. She developed an interpretation of Keynes’s policy approach to full employment for which she was recognized by the Association for Social Economics with the Helen Potter Prize (2012).