Arthur F. Burns

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Arthur Frank Burns (born April 27, 1904 in Stanyslaviv, Galicia (now Ivano-Frankivsk, Ukraine); died June 6, 1987 in Baltimore) was an American economist. Burns emigrated to the United States in 1914, and earned his B.A. and Ph.D. from Columbia University, the latter in 1934. His career alternated between academia and government. He taught at Columbia and studied business cycles while president of the National Bureau of Economic Research. He also was the chairman of the U.S. Council of Economic Advisors from 1953 to 1956 under Dwight D. Eisenhower's presidency. He served as the Chairman of the Federal Reserve from 1970–1978 and as ambassador to West Germany from 1981–1985.

The academic part of Burns's career focused on the measurement of business cycles, including questions such as the duration of expansions, and what economic variables rise during expansions and fall during recessions. He often collaborated with Wesley Clair Mitchell and set the academic tradition continued by the NBER's business cycle dating committee, which is generally considered authoritative in dating recessions. Burns's detailed macroeconomic analysis influenced Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz's classic work A Monetary History of the United States, 1867–1960.

As chairman of the Fed, Burns presided over a turbulent economy, including a sustained increase in the inflation rate. The consumer price index rose over 72% during his tenure. Negative economic events included multiple oil shocks and heavy government deficits arising in part from the Vietnam War and Great Society government programs.

Sources

Robert Sobel The Worldly Economists(1980).

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