Episode Details

Jon Hartley and Robert Barro discuss Robert’s career in economics including his long list of famous students, and research on Ricardian equivalence, fiscal theory of the price level, government spending multipliers, business cycles and the legacy of New Keynesian modeling, economic growth, political economy, the interplay between religion and economics, and much more.

Recorded on March 18, 2025.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS:

Robert J. Barro is a Paul M. Warburg Professor of Economics at Harvard University, a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, and a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. He has a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University and a B.S. in physics from Caltech.

Barro is co-editor of Harvard’s Quarterly Journal of Economics and has been President of the Western Economic Association and Vice President of the American Economic Association.

He was a viewpoint columnist for Business Week from 1998 to 2006 and a contributing editor of The Wall Street Journal from 1991 to 1998. He has written extensively on macroeconomics and economic growth.

Recent research involves rare macroeconomic disasters, corporate tax reform, religion & economy, empirical determinants of economic growth, and economic effects of public debt and budget deficits. Recent books include The Wealth of Religions: The Political Economy of Believing and Belonging (with Rachel M. McCleary), Economic Growth (2nd edition, with Xavier Sala-i-Martin), Nothing Is Sacred: Economic Ideas for the New Millennium, Determinants of Economic Growth, and Getting It Right: Markets and Choices in a Free Society.

Jon Hartley is currently a Policy Fellow at the Hoover Institution, an economics PhD Candidate at Stanford University, a Senior Fellow at the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity (FREOPP), a Senior Fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, and an Affiliated Scholar at the Mercatus Center. Jon also is the host of the Capitalism and Freedom in the 21st Century Podcast, an official podcast of the Hoover Institution, a member of the Canadian Group of Economists, and the chair of the Economic Club of Miami.

Jon has previously worked at Goldman Sachs Asset Management as a Fixed Income Portfolio Construction and Risk Management Associate and as a Quantitative Investment Strategies Client Portfolio Management Senior Analyst and in various policy/governmental roles at the World Bank, IMF, Committee on Capital Markets Regulation, U.S. Congress Joint Economic Committee, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, and the Bank of Canada. 

Jon has also been a regular economics contributor for National Review Online, Forbes and The Huffington Post and has contributed to