Jordi Galí, a full professor of Fundamentals of Economic Analysis at the UPF Department of Economics and Business and senior researcher at the Research Centre for International Economics (CREI), together with Olivier Blanchard (Paris School of Economics and MIT) and Michael Woodford (Columbia University), received the Frontiers of Knowledge Award from the BBVA Foundation in the field of Economics, Finance and Business Management during the ceremony of the 17th edition of these awards.

The award ceremony, which took place on 19 June at the Euskalduna Palace in Bilbao, has acknowledged a total of 20 world pioneers at the forefront of scientific research and artistic creation, belonging to eight categories. It was presided over by the president of the BBVA Foundation Carlos Torres Vila, and the president of the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), Eloísa del Pino.

The jury of the Economics, Finance and Business Management category, chaired by Eric Maskin, Adams Professor at Harvard University and Nobel Laureate in Economics, has awarded this candidacy “for its profound influence on modern macroeconomics in establishing the foundations of the new Keynesian paradigm and designing the rules and instruments of fiscal and monetary policy most used in the last fifteen years”.

After collecting the award, Michael Woodford (Columbia University) spoke on behalf of the three laureates explaining the value and validity of the macroeconomic paradigm that all three helped to build: the New Keynesian Economy. Woodford stressed that their research “has sought to provide a coherent analysis of the effects of monetary and fiscal policies in an imperfect world, where cognitive and institutional frictions prevent the market from adjusting itself efficiently”.

The BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Awards, endowed with 400,000 euros in each of the eight categories, acknowledge and encourage contributions of unique impact in science, technology, humanities and music, especially those that significantly broaden the scope of knowledge in a discipline, help new fields to emerge or build bridges between different disciplinary areas.

An expert on economic fluctuations and monetary policy, with a long and distinguished academic career

Jordi Galí (Barcelona, ​​1961) received his PhD in Economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1989 after graduating in Business Sciences and earning a master’s degree in International Management from ESADE in 1985. He completed his training with a bachelor’s degree in Economic Sciences in 1994 at Pompeu Fabra University. Since 2001, he has combined his work as a senior researcher at the Centre for Research in International Economics (CREI) -which he directed until 2017- with that of full professor of Fundamentals of Economic Analysis at the UPF Department of Economics and Business.

In addition, since 2009 he has been a research professor at the Barcelona School of Economics (BSE). He is a research fellow of the Centre for Economics Policy Research (CEPR), a research associate of the National Bureau of Economics Research (NBER) and a fellow of the Econometric Society. He has also been co-editor of the Journal of the European Economic Association and co-director of the International Macroeconomics programme at the CEPR. In 2012, he was appointed president of the European Economic Association.

Among other awards and honours, he has received the Rei Jaume I Prize for Economics (2004), the Yrjo Jahnsson Award (2005), the Catalan Society of Economics Award (2008), the National Research Award (2011), the Saint George’s Cross (2020) and the “Pascual Madoz” National Research Prize (2022).  He has been awarded three European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Grants and was honoured as a foreign honorary member of the American Economic Association in its 2020 awards.

His research, which focuses on macroeconomics and monetary theory, has yielded numerous articles, including “The Science of Monetary Policy: A New Keynesian Perspective”.