Scholars

Institute President Pavlina R. Tcherneva is a professor of economics at Bard College and founding director of the Bard-OSUN Economic Democracy Initiative. She specializes in modern money and public policy. She previously taught at Franklin and Marshall College and the University of Missouri–Kansas City. During 2000–6, she served as the associate director for economic analysis at the Center for Full Employment and Price Stability. In the summer of 2006, she was a visiting scholar at the University of Cambridge Centre for Economic and Public Policy, UK. She first joined the Levy Economics Institute in 1997 as a forecasting fellow and became a research associate in 2007. 
 
Tcherneva’s book The Case for a Job Guarantee (Polity 2020) is a timely guide to the benefits of one of the most transformative public policies being discussed today, recognized by the Financial Times in 2020 and published in nine languages. Her early work assessed Argentina’s adoption of a similar large-scale job creation proposal she had developed with colleagues in the United States. Tcherneva has collaborated with experts from the United Nations Human Rights Council, the International Labor Organization, members of the European Parliament, as well as policy makers from the United States and abroad on designing and evaluating employment programs. She also worked with the Sanders 2016 Presidential campaign after her research on inequality had garnered national attention. In 2020, she was invited to serve on the Biden-Harris economic policy volunteer committee, during their Presidential run.

Her areas of research include monetary and fiscal policy coordination, the Bernanke doctrine, and policy responses during the 2008 and 2020 COVID-induced economic crises. Her research has appeared in the Eastern Economic Journal, Review of Social Economy, Journal of Post Keynesian Economics, Journal of Economic Issues, International Journal of Political Economy, Revista de Economía Crítica, Revue Européenne du droit, and other journals and book volumes.

She is the coeditor of Full Employment and Price Stability: The Macroeconomic Vision of William S. Vickrey (Edward Elgar 2004), a rare collection of writings on employment and inflation by the Nobel Prize–winning economist, adapted for the modern day. In 2012, Tcherneva received the Association for Social Economics’ Helen Potter Prize for the best paper in the Review of Social Economy.

Tcherneva is a two-time grantee from the Institute for New Economic Thinking for her work on rethinking fiscal policy, job creation, and public goods provisioning. She holds a BA in mathematics and economics from Gettysburg College and an MA and a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Missouri–Kansas City.