Paul Romer is a University Professor at Boston College and directs its new Center for the Economics of Ideas. In 2018, he was a co-recipient of the 2018 Nobel Prize in Economics. The work recognized by the prize presented an “economics of ideas” that differs in a fundamental way from the traditional economics of scarce physical objects.
Paul received his B.S. in Mathematics and his Ph.D. in Economics from the U. of Chicago. Before coming to BC, he taught at NYU, Stanford, Berkeley, Chicago, and Rochester. In 2001 he started an education technology company, Aplia, that he sold to Thomson Learning in 2007 (which was soon spun out as Cengage Learning.)
Paul served as the Chief Economist at the World Bank where he worked to advance the multilateral institution’s critical research function. He was the Founding Director of NYU’s Marron Institute of Urban Management, which works to help cities plan for their futures and improve the health, safety, and mobility of their citizens. He also launched the concept of a city-scale startup that he called a Charter City, in honor of the first constitution, the charter that William Penn wrote for his startup– Pennsylvania.
Paul’s other contributions to public policy include his work with United States Department of Justice on the Microsoft Antitrust case and his service on Singapore’s Independent Academic Advisory Panel on University Policy. (See below for a selection of short articles on a various policy issues.)
He is currently a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a non-resident scholar at Macdonald-Laurier Institute in Ottawa, Ontario. In 2002, he received the Recktenwald Prize for his work on the economics of ideas. Paul earned a B.S. in mathematics from the University of Chicago and a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Chicago after pursuing graduate work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Queens University.
