Bio and CV

Kris James Mitchener is the Robert and Susan Finocchio Professor of Economics at Santa Clara University. He is a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) and the Centre for Competitive Advantage and the Global Economy (CAGE), and Research Fellow at the Centre for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), CESifo, and the Kiel Institute for the World Economy (ifW Kiel).

His research focuses on economic history, international economics, macroeconomics, and political economy. He is a leading expert on the history of financial crises, and is currently researching how banking crises redistribute risk in financial networks and how such networks can amplify the size of recessions. His current research in international economics analyzes how costly trade wars and currency wars alter bilateral trade flows. In macroeconomics, he is exploring the causal effects of monetary policy shocks on output and inflation and how losses at central banks influence lender-of-last-resort policies. In finance, he is exploring how contingent debt instruments can be used to help EMEs deal with shocks to their economies and how sub-sovereign debt instruments can be used to understand secession risk. 

His recent book, entitled In Defense of Public Debt,  explores the "two faces" of sovereign debt and how, throughout history, it has been used by nations in times of crisis, such as the recent global pandemic. His prior research on sovereign debt explores how the adoption of fixed exchange-rate influences risk spreads and how sovereign debt claims have been enforced historically. His path-breaking research on the Great Depression includes articles demonstrating how the size of credit booms influences the severity of the economic downturns and how the infamous banking panics of the 1930s reduced aggregate lending and monetary aggregates. 

Prior to his current position, he was professor of economics at the University of Warwick. In 2021-22, he was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in Behavioral Sciences, and the W. Glenn Campbell and Rita-Ricardo Campbell Hoover National Fellow at Stanford University from 2009-11. He has held visiting positions at the Bank of Japan, the Sveriges Riksbank, the Federal Reserve Banks of St. Louis and San Francisco, UCLA, Paris School of Economics, Waseda University, Queens University (Canada), and CREi at Universitat Pompeu Fabra. From 2015-2020, he was editor-in-chief of Explorations in Economic History. He presently serves on the editorial boards of the Financial History Review, Cliometrica, and Cambridge University Press. He received his B.A. (highest honors, Phi Beta Kappa) and Ph.D. in economics from the University of California, Berkeley.