- [Christina] The most important thing
that I try to pass on
is the sense that economics
is an empirical field,
then if you get
new empirical evidence,
you're going to have
to change the way
you think about the economy.
I think being open to that
is the most important thing
for a young economist to know.
Economists -- not a group
with a lot of Marys,
Natashas or Juanitas,
and that's caused
a lot of controversy.
However, what's often overlooked
are the actual female economists
who are pushing economics forward
by addressing real-world issues.
Welcome to Women in Economics.
♪ [music] ♪
I grew up in a family
where public policy
was discussed a lot.
I was planning to be a lawyer,
so I was going to major
in Government.
And as part of the Government
major at my college,
you had to take
a year of Economics.
I was about three weeks in,
and I was hooked,
like the government major's gone,
the lawyer's gone,
I was in an Economist.
Christina Romer
is a macro economic historian.
She takes the tools
of modern economics,
statistics, and data
and applies them
to historical questions.
- [Narrator] Christie's researcher
agenda throughout her career
has focused
on a course set of topics
about economic fluctuations
and business cycles.
She's been asking and answering
fascinating questions
about our economy,
starting with her dissertation
as a graduate student at MIT.
There, she changed
her understanding
of how the economy
has grown over time.
I think the questions
that came to me
were about monetary policy
and business cycles
and the Great Depression.
- [Narrator] It was widely believed
that government policies led to
less fluctuations and unemployment
after World War II.
However, the data before
World War II was unreliable.
- [Nancy] But Christie came up
with the ingenious insight
that while you couldn't clean up
the historical data,
you could fuzzy up
the more modern data,
and that's exactly what she did.
And when she did it, lo and behold,
all these differences
basically collapsed.
- [Narrator] Amazingly,
if she applied
the old techniques to the new data,
the pose WOrld War II economy
looked just as volatile
as the pre-World War economy.
This contradicted the consensus
on the role of government
stabilization policies.
Her research rattled
the economic community.
It made a splash.
I remember one of the prominent
economist MIT,
his first reaction was,
"Well, I'd be very upset
about this if I believed it.
So I'm not going to believe it."
Throughout her academic career,
Christine continued to challenge
her understanding
of the Great Depression.
As just one example,
most economists believed
the Great Depression ended
because of higher
government spending
and investment in public works.
She showed that the impact
of those policies
were relatively small compared to
the monetary policy
changes taking place