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RIP Harvard's Martin Feldstein. The obits I've seen so far stress his political roles, but his lasting legacies will come from research -- both his own, and the research environment he created for young economists 1/
A quick Google Scholar check shows that his most cited work was on international capital flows; the famous Feldstein-Horioka result that such flows were much smaller than you might expect has challenged scholars for decades 2/
He did crucially important work on the extent to which raising taxes reduces reported taxable income; whatever your politics, this work is crucial for policy decisions ahead of us now 3/
He was an early critic of the euro, and many of his warnings about the problems of adopting a single currency for disparate countries have proved prescient 4/
As long time head of the National Bureau of Economic Research he turned what had been a fairly stagnant think tank into a vibrant "invisible college", where the exchange of ideas via conferences and working papers became central to multiple fields 5/
My own academic career was basically jump-started by a presentation I gave at the first of the NBER's summer institutes, in 1979. And in all the fields I've worked in, NBER working papers – created under Marty's leadership – effectively became the main way research spread 6/
Marty became Ronald Reagan's chief economic adviser in 1982. In many ways he was a voice in the wilderness within that administration, pleading for more fiscal responsibility. But he did bring a new level of intelligent policy analysis 7/
Oh, and in 1982-3 he brought with him some young technocrats – at a sub-political level, because these were the days when you could still serve the U.S. government even if you had differences with its top leadership 8/
One of those technocrats was Larry Summers, who went on to play crucial policy roles in both the Clinton and the Obama administrations. Another was, well, me. I've always been grateful for the opportunity he gave me to see policymaking up close 9/
Later on, of course, we had our policy differences. But Feldstein was a very good man and a very good economist, whose efforts touched and improved the lives and careers of many younger economists. I mourn his passing 10/
