Quick Facts
Biography
Stephanie Kelton (née Bell; born October 10, 1969) is an American economist and academic. She is currently a professor at Stony Brook University and was formerly a professor University of Missouri–Kansas City. She also served as an advisor to Bernie Sanders' 2016 presidential campaign.
She is founder and editor-in-chief of the blog New Economic Perspectives. She was named one of Politico's 50 "thinkers, doers and visionaries transforming American politics in 2016." In fall 2019, she joined the board of Matriarch PAC.
Education
Kelton studied Business Finance and Economics at the California State University, Sacramento, earning a B.S. and a B.A. in 1995. She received a Rotary scholarship to study Economics at the University of Cambridge, receiving her Master's degree in 1997. On a fellowship from Christ's College, Cambridge, Kelton then spent a year at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College. She obtained a Ph.D. in Economics from The New School in 2001 with her dissertation, "Public Policy and Government Finance: A Comparative Analysis Under Different Monetary Systems."
Employment
Kelton is currently a Professor of Public Policy and Economics at Stony Brook University and was formerly the Chair of the Economics Department at the University of Missouri–Kansas City. She was a research scholar at the UMKC Center for Full Employment and Price Stability and the Levy Economics Institute in upstate New York.
Kelton is editor-in-chief of the New Economic Perspectives blog.
On December 26, 2014, Kelton was designated as Chief Economist for the Democratic Minority Staff of the Senate Budget Committee, a post that she held in 2015 and early 2016, when she left that position to become an economic advisor to the Bernie Sanders campaign.
On May 25, 2017, Stony Brook University announced that Kelton would join the university: "This fall as a professor in the forthcoming Center for the Study of Inequality and Social Justice." Kelton follows her husband Paul's appointment at Stony Brook as the first Robert David Lion Gardiner Chair in American History, established in February 2016, at the College of Arts and Sciences.
In 2019, Kelton has been invited to be the Geoff Harcourt Visiting Professor at the University of Adelaide in Australia.
Research
Kelton's primary research interests include monetary theory, employment policy, history of economic monetary thought, social security, public finance, fiscal policy, financial accounting, international finance, and European monetary integration. She has been a notable proponent of and researcher in Modern Monetary Theory, publishing several papers and editing books in the field, and a supporter of the proposal for a Job Guarantee.
In the media
Kelton publishes formally as well as in the popular press and appears on mass media. She has been a frequent guest on television and radio, including MSNBC's Up with Chris Hayes and NPR's On Point. Kelton has had opinion pieces published in the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times. How We Think About the Deficit Is Mostly Wrong appeared in The New York Times.Kelton wrote the article, Congress can give every American a pony (if it breeds enough ponies), which appeared in The Los Angeles Times.
Selected works
- Bell (Kelton), Stephanie, "Can Taxes and Bonds Finance Government Spending?", Levy Economics Institute, July 1998
- Bell (Kelton), Stephanie, "The role of the state and the hierarchy of money", Cambridge Journal of Economics, Vol. 25, 2001, pp. 149–163
- Kelton, Stephanie, Edward J. Nell, editors. The State, the Market, and the Euro: Metallism versus Chartalism in the Theory of Money; Edward Elgar; Reprint edition: May 2003; ISBN 9781843761563
- Kelton, Stephanie, The Deficit Myth, June 2020; ISBN 9781541736184
