Paul Romer

Paul Romer

Paul M. Romer (born 1955) is an American economist, entrepreneur, and activist. He is currently professor of economics at the Stern School of Business at New York University. Prior to that, Romer was a senior fellow at Stanford University's Center for International Development, the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, and the Hoover Institution, and a fellow at the Center for Global Development. He is a pioneer of endogenous growth theory. He temporarily left academia, focusing his energy on his 2001 start-up company Aplia which developed online homework problem sets for college students; Aplia was purchased in 2007 by Cengage Learning.

Romer earned a B.S. in physics in 1977 and a Ph.D. in economics in 1983, both from the University of Chicago. He taught at the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Chicago, and the University of Rochester. He was named one of America's 25 most influential people by Time Magazine in 1997. Romer was awarded the Horst Claus Recktenwald Prize in Economics in 2002. He is the son of former Colorado governor Roy Romer.