Yellen, Janet Louise [key], 1946–, U.S. economist and government official, b. Brooklyn, N.Y., B.A. Brown (1967), Ph.D. Yale (1971). Yellen taught economics (1971–76) at Harvard and subsequently has been an economist (1977–78) with the Federal Reserve's board of governors, a lecturer (1978–80) at the London School of Economics, and a professor (1980–, now emeritus) at the Haas School of Business, Univ. of California, Berkeley. She was a member of the Federal Reserve Board's board of governors (1994–97), chaired the Council of Economic Advisers (1997–99) under President Clinton, and was president of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco (2004–10). In 2010 she was appointed vice chair of the Federal Reserve Board by President Obama; in 2013 he named her to succeed (2014) Ben Bernanke as Federal Reserve Board chair. A Keynesian economist, she was a supporter of the Federal Reserve's policies on monetary stimulus and financial regulation, and its goals for inflation and unemployment, and during the Great Recession she advocated for an aggressive response to the financial and economic crisis. During her single term as Board chair, the Federal Reserve continued policies begun under Bernanke that were designed to shepherd the economy in its recovery, and in late 2015 began to slowly raise its target short-term interest rate, which had been at a low of 0.25% for several years. In 2021, President Biden nominated her for secretary of the treasury. Yellen is the author of Efficiency Wage Models of the Labor Market (1986, with George Akerlof, her husband) and The Fabulous Decade: Macroeconomic Lessons from the 1990s (2001, with Alan Blinder).
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