Rudi Dornbusch - Biography

Biography

Dornbusch was born in Krefeld in present-day North Rhine-Westphalia. After completing his secondary education at the Gymnasium am Moltkeplatz in Krefeld he went to study abroad. He received his Licence en Sciences Politiques from the University of Geneva in 1966, where he also stayed on for a year as an Assistant in Economics in the Graduate Institute of International Studies, and subsequently moved to the United States where he obtained his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Chicago. He also briefly worked as a Lecturer in the Graduate School of Business of that university. For two years he stayed at the University of Rochester as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Economics, followed by a year as Associate Professor of International Economics, again in the Graduate School of Business of the University of Chicago. In 1975 he moved to MIT, where he was appointed as Associate Professor in the Department of Economics. In 1984 he became Professor of economics. He stayed in MIT until his death in 2002.

Throughout his career his main focus was on international economics, especially monetary policy, macroeconomic development, growth and international trade. According to some of his students and associates his talent was to extract the heart of a problem and make it understandable in simple terms. For example, he explained fluctuations in prices and exchange rates with great clarity (notably with his Overshooting Model). He worked also for the International Monetary Fund, making controversial contributions to the development of stabilisation policies, especially for Latin American countries. For more than 15 years he served as an associate editor of the Quarterly Journal of Economics.

Together with Stanley Fischer he also wrote widely-used undergraduate textbooks.

He died, aged sixty, from cancer.