About

Karen Dynan is a Professor of the Practice in the Department of Economics and at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, and a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. Her research interests include fiscal and monetary policy, consumer behavior, and economic measurement. Prior to joining Harvard, Dynan served as Assistant Secretary for Economic Policy and Chief Economist at the U.S. Department of the Treasury from 2014 to 2017. She also held the position of Vice President and Co-Director of the Economic Studies Program at the Brookings Institution from 2009 to 2013.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Economics
• Sociology
• Demographic economics
• Labour economics
• Demography
• Medicine
• Finance
• Gerontology

Selected publications

• Whither the federal budget?

  Business Economics · 2026-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• The Worst Inflation Outbreak in 40 years: Distilling Lessons from the COVID Era

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2026-01-01

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• The COVID Era Inflation Surge: Causes, Consequences, and Policy Lessons

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2026-01-01

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Lessons for Automatic Fiscal Stabilizers from the Great Recession and the COVID Recession

  Tax Policy and the Economy · 2025-10-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This paper simulates economic developments as if the discretionary fiscal stimulus enacted in the past two recessions had not occurred and additional automatic fiscal stabilizers had been deployed instead.For the calibration of key economic relationships most consistent with the empirical literature, we find that more sustained fiscal stimulus would have pushed unemployment down more rapidly following the Great Recession and that more limited stimulus would have caused inflation to increase much less following the COVID recession.We caution, though, that our estimates are uncertain given the large number of assumptions embedded in the calculations.Under different assumptions about the supply side of the economy when resource utilization is high, the stimulus enacted in early 2021 was not a significant cause of the observed runup in inflation that followed, and substituting an automatic stabilizer would have made little difference to inflation.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Putting US Fiscal Policy on a Sustainable Path

  The Journal of Economic Perspectives · 2025-11-01 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Even allowing for uncertainty about the future economy, current US fiscal policies are almost certainly unsustainable. Therefore, policymakers must decide when and in what ways to raise taxes and reduce spending to put debt on a lower trajectory. Acting sooner rather than later would increase national savings, broaden the policy options, reduce the chance of a fiscal crisis, and provide fiscal space for responding to adverse developments. The probability of a near-term fiscal crisis is difficult to assess: Yields on Treasury debt are within their ranges of the past few decades, which suggests that investors are not that worried about the budget outlook—but debt and deficits are at exceptionally high levels, and experience shows that investors’ confidence in a government’s fiscal management can deteriorate quickly.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Changes in Racial Gaps in Retirement Security over Time

  2025-04-03

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract We explore changes over time in how financially prepared Americans are for retirement, with a focus on the relative positions of Black and White families, using a data source, the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, that oversamples lower-income families. The PSID also has longitudinal information, which permits us to examine the impact of families’ past experiences on their retirement security. We find not only a large White–Black disparity in non-pension wealth, but also notable declines between 2001 and 2019, with median non-pension wealth relative to income dropping by 15 percent and 60 percent for White and Black families in their 50s, respectively. Together with marked reductions in the prevalence of defined benefit pensions, these declines imply that estimated income replacement rates for families near retirement were, on average, about 9 percentage points lower for families with White heads and about 8 percentage points lower for families with Black heads in 2019 than in 2005.

  PublisherDOI

• Putting US Fiscal Policy on a Sustainable Path

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Report of the Committee on Economic Statistics

  AEA Papers and Proceedings · 2025-05-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Report of the Committee on Economic StatisticsThe AEA Committee on Economic Statistics (AEAStat) promotes AEA member access to current, detailed, useful economic statistics provided by the federal government and other sources.To this end, AEAStat undertakes formal and informal educational activities, mostly in Washington, DC, that aim to

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Coyle, Diane. The Measure of Progress: Counting What Really Matters

  Journal of Economic Literature · 2025-12-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Karen Dynan of Harvard University reviews “The Measure of Progress: Counting What Really Matters” by Diane Coyle. The Econlit abstract of this book begins: “Explores the shortcomings in standard economic measurement and why the current metrics miss important considerations, highlighting over a decade's worth of research on questions of economic statistics and measurement.”

  PublisherDOI

• Fiscal Policy and the Pandemic-Era Surge in US Inflation: Lessons for the Future

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01 · 6 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Robert C. Feenstra

  University of California, Davis

  36 shared

• Randall S. Kroszner

  36 shared

• Susanto Basu

  36 shared

• John M. Abowd

  36 shared

• Jonathan A. Parker

  New School

  36 shared

• Ana Aizcorbe

  Bureau of Economic Analysis

  36 shared

• Douglas W. Elmendorf

  34 shared

• Daniel E. Sichel

  Wellesley College

  20 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Economics

  Harvard University

  1993

• B.A., Economics

  Stanford University

  1988