- [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