Carmen Reinhart

Early life Born in Havana, Cuba, Reinhart arrived in the United States on January 6, 1966, at the age of 10, with her mother and father and three suitcases. They settled in Pasadena, California, during the early years before moving to South Florida, where she grew up. When the family moved to Miami, Reinhart started college at two-year Miami Dade College, before transferring to Florida International University, where she received a B.A. in Economics (summa cum laude) in 1975. After her B.A., Reinhart worked for her master's degree in philosophy, eventually receiving this degree in 1981 from Columbia University. A few years down the road, Reinhart also received her Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1988. Reinhart in 1978 went on to attend Columbia University graduate school.

Awards and honours In the June 2023 Graduation Ceremonies at University of St Andrews, Reinhart was awarded Doctor of Laws (LLD), in recognition of her major contribution to economics.

Research and publication She has written and published on a variety of topics in macroeconomics and international finance, including: international capital flows, capital controls, inflation and commodity prices, banking and sovereign debt crises, currency crashes, and contagion. Her work has been published in scholarly journals such as The American Economic Review, the Journal of Political Economy, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, and the Journal of Economic Perspectives. Her work is featured in the financial press, including The Economist, Newsweek, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal. Her work has helped to inform the understanding of financial crises in both advanced economies and emerging markets. It has been translated to over 20 languages and won the Paul A. Samuelson Award, among others.

She also has written monthly columns for international media organization Project Syndicate since 2014.

Work on the 2008 near-meltdown and the Great Recession of 2008 & 2009

Fellow economist Alan Blinder credits both Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff with describing highly relevant aspects of the 2008 financial crisis and the Great Recession.

Criticism and controversy In 2013, Reinhart and Rogoff were in the spotlight after researchers discovered that their 2010 paper "Growth in a Time of Debt" in The American Economic Review Papers and Proceedings had methodological and computational errors. The work argued that debt above 90% of GDP was particularly harmful to economic growth, while corrections have shown this is not the case, and that the negative correlation between debt and growth does not increase above 90% as their work had contended. A separate and previous criticism is that the negative correlation between debt and growth need not be causal. Rogoff and Reinhart claimed that their fundamental conclusions were accurate, despite the errors.

A review by Herndon, Ash, and Pollin of her widely cited paper with Rogoff, "Growth in a Time of Debt", argued that "coding errors, selective exclusion of available data, and unconventional weighting of summary statistics lead to serious errors that inaccurately represent the relationship between public debt and GDP growth among 20 advanced economies in the post-war period".

Personal life Reinhart met her husband, Vincent Reinhart, when they were classmates at Columbia University in the late 1970s. They have one son.

Selected publications Reinhart, Carmen, and Vincent Reinhart. "The Crisis Next Time: What We Should Have Learned from 2008." Foreign Affairs 97.6 (November/December 2018): 84–97. Reinhart, Carmen M., Vincent Reinhart, Christoph Trebesch. "Global Cycles: Capital Flows, Commodities, and Sovereign Defaults, 1815–2015." The American Economic Review 106.5 (May 2016): 574–580. Reinhart, Carmen M., and Christoph Trebesch. "Sovereign Debt Relief and Its Aftermath." Journal of the European Economic Association 14.1 (February 2016): 215–251. Reinhart, Carmen M., and Christoph Trebesch. "The International Monetary Fund: 70 Years of Reinvention." The Journal of Economic Perspectives 30.1 (January 2016): 3–27 Kenneth Rogoff, and Carmen Reinhart. (2010) "Growth in a Time of Debt." American Economic Review 100.2: 573–578. Graciela Kaminsky and Carmen Reinhart. (1999). "The Twin Crises: The Causes of Banking and Balance-of-Payments Problems". American Economic Review, 473–500. Kenneth Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart. (2009). This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly. Princeton University Press.