Anna Schwartz

Anna Schwartz was an American economist whose pioneering work in monetary economics and economic history fundamentally reshaped modern understanding of financial crises and central banking. A longtime researcher at the National Bureau of Economic Research, she is best known for her decades-long collaboration with Milton Friedman, producing seminal works that championed monetarism. Her rigorous empirical analysis provided the intellectual foundation for policies combating inflation and informed the responses of institutions like the Federal Reserve to later economic turmoil.

Early life and education

Anna Jacobson was born in New York City to immigrant parents from Eastern Europe. She demonstrated academic prowess early, graduating from Walton High School at age fifteen. She pursued her undergraduate studies at Barnard College, where she earned a degree in economics in 1934. Schwartz continued her education at Columbia University, completing a master's degree in 1935 and a doctorate in 1964 under the supervision of noted economist Arthur F. Burns. Her doctoral dissertation focused on British economic history, foreshadowing her lifelong commitment to data-driven historical analysis.

Career and research

Schwartz began her professional career during the Great Depression, working briefly for the Department of Agriculture and the Central Statistical Board. In 1941, she joined the research staff of the National Bureau of Economic Research in New York City, where she would remain for over seventy years. At the NBER, she worked under the mentorship of Wesley Clair Mitchell and collaborated with Milton Friedman, Phillip Cagan, and Michael D. Bordo. Her meticulous work compiling and analyzing long-term financial data sets, including for the United States Treasury, became the empirical bedrock for major studies in monetary economics.

Contributions to monetary economics

Schwartz's contributions centered on the critical role of money supply in determining nominal income and price levels. Her research provided compelling historical evidence that sustained inflation is always a monetary phenomenon. She argued that severe economic contractions, most notably the Great Depression, were primarily caused by drastic declines in the money stock due to failures of the banking system and misguided policies of the Federal Reserve. This work challenged prevailing Keynesian views and emphasized the importance of stable, predictable monetary growth for economic stability.

Collaboration with Milton Friedman

The defining partnership of Schwartz's career was with Nobel laureate Milton Friedman. Their collaboration began in the 1940s and culminated in the 1963 publication of the landmark book A Monetary History of the United States, 1867–1960. This monumental study, published by Princeton University Press, used nearly a century of data to argue that monetary forces were central to business cycle fluctuations. They later co-authored Monetary Statistics of the United States (1970) and Monetary Trends in the United States and the United Kingdom (1982). Friedman frequently credited Schwartz as an equal partner, whose scholarly rigor was indispensable to their joint work.

Awards and recognition

Schwartz received numerous accolades for her transformative research. In 1981, she became the first woman elected a Distinguished Fellow of the American Economic Association. She was awarded the prestigious Francis A. Walker Medal in 1987, an honor bestowed only once every five years. In 2007, the American Economic Association again recognized her lifetime of achievement. Her expertise was sought by congressional committees, including the House Financial Services Committee, and she served as an advisor to the Shadow Open Market Committee, a group monitoring Federal Open Market Committee policies.

Personal life and legacy

In 1936, she married Isaac Schwartz, a Public Health Service officer, with whom she had four children. She maintained an active research and writing schedule well into her nineties, authoring influential commentary on the financial crisis of 2007–2008 and critiquing the response of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Anna Schwartz died in Manhattan in 2012. Her legacy endures as a foundational figure in monetarism; her empirical work continues to be cited by economists like Ben Bernanke and central bankers worldwide, underscoring the vital importance of monetary stability. Category:American economists Category:Monetary economists Category:1915 births Category:2012 deaths