About

Theo S. Eicher holds the Castor Professorship in Economics at the University of Washington. He received his Ph.D. in Economics from Columbia University in 1994 and his BA in Chinese Studies and Economics from Grinnell College. His fields of interest include Development Economics, Economic Growth, International Finance, International Trade, and Macroeconomics. Professor Eicher has served as Editor of the European Economic Review, on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Macroeconomics, and on the Advisory Council of the Revista de Ciencias Económicas. He is the founding director of the UW Economics Policy Research Center, a forum to engage public and private sector stakeholders in economic policy discussions vital to the region. Additionally, he is an Affiliate Professor at the Jackson School of International Studies, Center for Global Studies, and at the Center for Statistics and the Social Sciences at the University of Washington. His visiting positions include institutions such as University Aix-Marseille, the International Monetary Fund, Universidad de Costa Rica, University of Munich, University of Leipzig, Institute of Advanced Studies (Vienna), Bonn University, Barcelona University, Technical University Zurich, University of Tübingen, and Oxford University (Nuffield College). For more information about his research, he maintains a personal website.

Research topics

• Economics
• Macroeconomics
• Political Science
• Public economics
• International economics
• Business
• Monetary economics
• Agricultural economics
• Finance

Selected publications

• Effects of IMF-supported programs on gender inequality

  European Journal of Political Economy · 2025-09-11 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Evaluating the Impact of IMF Programs on GDP Growth: A Synthetic Control Method Approach

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Effects of IMF-Supported Programs on Gender Inequality

  IMF Working Paper · 2024-12-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Crises often require economic consolidations that may unevenly affect different segments of the population. Some crisis countries enter financial arrangements with the IMF and adopt adjustment programs, and studies have associated program conditionality with negative impacts on gender inequality. Proper evaluations of the impacts of IMF-supported programs on gender inequality require, however, credible control groups that address the counterfactual: do post-crisis gender disparities evolve differently without an IMF-supported program? We examine over 150 IMF-supported programs (1994-2022) using custom-tailored control groups that match each IMF-supported program country’s gender and economic trends and find overwhelming evidence against systematic impacts of IMF-supported programs on gender equality.

  PublisherDOI

• Housing Prices and Land Use Regulations: A Study of 250 Major US Cities

  Journal of Economic Analysis · 2023 · 8 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Agricultural economics
  • Business
  • Economics

  <p><big>Income and population growth are key determinants of housing demand, while land use regulations are designed to affect housing supply. Previous studies of housing price determinants focus either on specific regulations in particular cities/regions, or on selective subsets of major cities and regulations. This study examines the impact of land use regulations on housing prices from 1989 to 2006 in an unusually large sample of 250 major US cities. Aside from factors that are commonly associated with housing demand (income, population growth and density), housing prices are found to be associated with local cost-increasing land use regulations (approval delays) and with statewide regulations. Since statewide regulations factor prominently into the results, specific examples of the impact of different types of land use regulations are provided for 5 cities in the state of Washington. The estimated increase in housing prices associated with regulations is, on average (over 250 cities), substantially larger than the effects of income and population growth. While the estimated dollar costs associated with regulations may be sizable at times, the results are remarkably consistent with previous studies that were based on smaller cross sections.</big></p>

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Systemic bias of IMF reserve and debt forecasts for program countries

  International Journal of Forecasting · 2023-09-22

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• The accuracy of IMF crises nowcasts

  International Journal of Forecasting · 2022 · 3 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Economics
  • Macroeconomics
  PublisherDOI

• IMF trade forecasts for crisis countries: Bias, inefficiency, and their origins

  International Journal of Forecasting · 2022 · 7 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Economics
  • International economics
  • Monetary economics
  PublisherDOI

• Forecasts in times of crises

  International Journal of Forecasting · 2019-04-17 · 20 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• European influence and economic development

  Canadian Journal of Economics/Revue canadienne d économique · 2019-05-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract The development accounting literature identifies political institutions as fundamental development determinants. Forms of government or executive constraints are thought to shape economic institutions (e.g., property rights) that provide necessary incentives for economic growth. One strand of the literature suggests that European influence is a crucial economic development determinant, presumably through the adoption of European institutions. But how exactly did European influence in the distant past induce positive economic outcomes today? Previous approaches rely on “language,” “settler mortality,” “legal origins” or the “number of European settlers” as indirect proxies of European influence. We propose a direct and quantifiable mechanism: the adoption of European constitutional features. We construct a dataset of all constitutional dimensions from 1800–2008 for all countries and find that nations experience growth accelerations after adopting features of European constitutions. The growth effects are influenced (negatively) by periods of political turmoil, but they are independent of colonial backgrounds. These results show how European influence may have fostered growth, and they imply that countries were able to overcome adverse initial conditions over the last 200 years by adopting European constitutional features. Our constitutional dataset is sufficiently detailed to identify the specific dimensions of European constitutions that matter most for development: legislative rules and specific provisions that curtail executive powers.

  PublisherDOI

• Forecasts in Times of Crises

  IMF Working Paper · 2018-01-01 · 7 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Financial crises pose unique challenges for forecast accuracy. Using the IMF's Monitoring of Fund Arrangement (MONA) database, we conduct the most comprehensive evaluation of IMF forecasts to date for countries in times of crises. We examine 29 macroeconomic variables in terms of bias, efficiency, and information content to find that IMF forecasts add substantial informational value as they consistently outperform naive forecast approaches. However, we also document that there is room for improvement: two thirds of the key macroeconomic variables that we examine are forecast inefficiently and 6 variables (growth of nominal GDP, public investment, private investment, the current account, net transfers, and government expenditures) exhibit significant forecast bias. Forecasts for low-income countries are the main drivers of forecast bias and inefficiency, reflecting perhaps larger shocks and lower data quality. When we decompose the forecast errors into their sources, we find that forecast errors for private consumption growth are the key contributor to GDP growth forecast errors. Similarly, forecast errors for non-interest expenditure growth and tax revenue growth are crucial determinants of the forecast errors in the growth of fiscal budgets. Forecast errors for balance of payments growth are significantly influenced by forecast errors in goods import growth. The results highlight which macroeconomic aggregates require further attention in future forecast models for countries in crises.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Stephen J. Turnovsky

  University of Washington

  28 shared

• Cecilia García‐Peñalosa

  21 shared

• Chris Papageorgiou

  International Monetary Fund

  17 shared

• Christian Henn

  12 shared

• Oliver Roehn

  Organisation de Coopération et de Développement Economiques

  10 shared

• Alex Lenkoski

  Norwegian Computing Center

  9 shared

• John Mutti

  8 shared

• Thomas Strobel

  Ca' Foscari University of Venice

  8 shared

Education

• Ph.D.

  Columbia University

• B.A., Chinese Studies and Economics

  Grinnell College

Awards & honors

• Editor of the European Economic Review
• Advisory Council of the Revista de Ciencias Económicas