Lawrence Christiano is the Alfred W. Chase Professor of Business Institutions. He joined the Northwestern University faculty in 1992 and is a consultant to the Federal Reserve Banks of Chicago, Cleveland and Minneapolis, and a Research Affiliate of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). In 2001, he was elected a Fellow of the Econometric Society.
Christiano's research has been focused primarily on the problem of determining how the government's monetary and fiscal instruments ought to respond to shocks over the business cycle. This research has two parts; one involves formulating and estimating an empirically plausible model of the macroeconomy, and the second involves developing economic concepts and computational methods for determining optimal policy in an equilibrium model. He has received numerous grants from the National Science Foundation and is an Associate Editor of the Journal of Money, Credit and Banking.
Christiano teaches macroeconomics, international finance and applied time series analysis. He received his PhD in economics from Columbia University. Prior to his appointment at Northwestern, Professor Christiano worked at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis (1985-1992) and was a professor at the University of Chicago (1981-1985).