Jon Steinsson

Steinsson's most influential work is his collaborative research with Emi Nakamura, particularly their studies using supermarket scanner and BLS micro-data to measure price stickiness and their analysis of fiscal multipliers using regional variation in U.S. military spending. Their joint papers have become among the most cited in empirical macroeconomics over the past two decades.

Steinsson is the Chancellor's Professor of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley, where he has been on the faculty since completing his PhD at Princeton University. He is also a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and co-director of its macroeconomics program.

Using geographic variation in U.S. military spending across states, Nakamura and Steinsson estimated a local fiscal multiplier of approximately 1.5, meaning each dollar of government spending generates about $1.50 in local output. Their approach treats differential military spending across states as a natural experiment that helps overcome the identification challenges that plague aggregate fiscal multiplier estimates.

Steinsson's empirical work with Nakamura showed that monetary policy has significant real effects on output, partly because prices are much stickier than flexible-price models predict. Their research on how individual prices adjust in response to macroeconomic shocks has influenced how central banks, including the Federal Reserve, calibrate their policy models.