Biography of Austan Goolsbee

Austan Dean Goolsbee is an economist and is currently the Robert P. Gwinn Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business. He is also a Research Fellow at the American Bar Foundation, Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and a member of the Panel of Economic Advisors to the Congressional Budget Office. He has been Barack Obama's economic advisor since Obama's successful U.S. Senate campaign in Illinois. He was until recently the lead economic advisor to the 2008 Obama presidential campaign and is known as a centrist. Austan Goolsbee is Senior Economist to the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) and the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI). He was interviewed in January 2008 about the Obama economic plan on tax cuts, deficits, and trade policies.

Some of the known press profiles of him include those done by NPR, George Will, the Financial Times, Reuters TV, the Chicago Tribune, Crain's Chicago Business,[13] and the Abilene Reporter-News.

He is the former host of the show History's Business on the History Channel.

Goolsbee's academic research focuses on the Internet, the new economy, government policy, and taxes. He currently teaches a class on economics and policy in the telecom, media and technology industries. He's part of a new wave called "new social economics". Along with Steven Levitt, author of Freakonomics, he and others focus on human activity in natural settings and find economic explanations for how people behave.

In April 2006, Goolsbee began writing for the Economic Scene column in the New York Times. He has also appeared in their Economic View column. Before that he wrote the Dismal Science column for Slate.com, for which he won the 2006 Peter Lisagor Award for Exemplary Journalism. He has many published papers in various peer-reviewed journals.