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It was 2 a.m. on a long holiday weekend when Adrien Auclert logged in from his home near ��ɫ��Ӱ for a virtual meeting that illustrates why he became an economist. On his screen was France’s finance minister, who spoke with Auclert about his views on the country’s troubled finances.

The conversation — coming shortly after Auclert was appointed a top economic adviser to the French government — was both a testament to Auclert’s rise in policy circles and to the new world of work, where a new parent can ask a government leader to meet online with little regard to the clock or calendar.

Meetings with policymakers, online or off, happen with some frequency these days for Auclert, who once toyed with a career as a policymaker but chose academia instead.

“The amount of influence I have today on policymaking as an academic relative to me working my way up at a central bank is an order of magnitude higher,” says Auclert, who is regularly invited to speak with Federal Reserve Bank officials around the U.S. and their counterparts in Europe. “When I started in economics, I never dreamed that the high-level conversations I have with policymakers would be possible.”

This is largely because Auclert, an associate professor of economics in the ��ɫ��Ӱ School of Humanities and Sciences and senior fellow at the ��ɫ��Ӱ Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR), is in the vanguard of a new approach to economics its proponents say will lead to better policymaking.

The main idea is that populations comprise diverse groups of people — and not just, as economists traditionally think, individuals who are rational and fully-informed. Factoring these differences into research and policy analyses, say Auclert and other adopters of the approach, leads to a clearer understanding of a policy’s winners and losers.

That’s where HANK comes in – the Heterogeneous Agent New Keynesian method that Auclert has used to shed important new light on, for example, how government stimulus can exacerbate wealth inequality and how energy shocks can cause recessions.

Auclert long aspired to a front-row seat at the policymaking table. But first, he landed on an engineering path at the prestigious ENSAE Paris, located in the city where he was born and raised. “I liked math, I liked algorithms, and I liked science,” says Auclert. “I also liked the thought of engineering for social good.”

A conversation with Bank of England representatives at a job fair opened his eyes to economic policymaking and its need for statistical modeling. Following a summer internship at the Bank of England, Auclert earned a masters degree from the London School of Economics and then returned to British central bank as a staff economist.

“I loved being able to think deeply about an economics problem, figure out a way to model it, and then use the tools of economics to solve it,” Auclert says. “And I liked how the ultimate goal was to build models that fed into the monetary policy process as opposed to a bank’s bottom line.”

Auclert wanted to get even closer to the policymaking process, so he went back to school and graduated in 2015 with a PhD in economics from MIT. Initially he thought about joining a central bank or a global organization like the International Monetary Fund, but his MIT advisor convinced him to try academia first.

Given his growing policy influence, no wonder Auclert hasn’t looked back.

Story by Krysten Crawford. Photos by Ryan Zhang. Published in 2024.