Sérgio T. Rebelo '89

Sérgio RebeloSérgio Rebelo was born on October 29 1959, in Viseu, Portugal. He attended the Portuguese Catholic University from 1976 to 1981, obtaining his BA degree in economics. He then served as teaching assistant and instructor at this institution and attended the master's program in Operations Research and Systems Engineering of the Technical University of Lisbon. He obtained his master's degree in April 1985. In the fall of 1984 he enrolled in the University of Rochester's PhD program in economics.

Sérgio Rebelo has been a leading researcher on the frontier of macroeconomics and economic growth. His influential work started to develop while he was still a graduate student at Rochester. His dissertation work, under the supervision of Professor Robert G. King and Professor Paul M. Romer, led to two famous publications:

"Production, Growth and Business Cycles", Journal of Monetary Economics, 1988 (joint with Robert King and Charles Plosser).

This paper develops the neoclassical model of capital accumulation [as put forth by Brock and Mirman (1972)] as the basic framework for modern business cycle analysis. The authors explore the implications of this model for economic fluctuations. This work also develops methods to study approximate dynamics around the steady-state. These methods have become widely used in macroeconomics.

"Long-Run Policy Analysis and Long-Run Growth", Journal of Political Economy, 1991.

This paper is a fundamental contribution to the theory of endogenous growth (i.e., a class of models where growth occurs in the absence of exogenous increases to productivity). Here, Sérgio argues that the wide cross-country disparity in rates of economic growth can be the result of cross-country differences in government policy. He focuses on the effect that taxation has on growth. This classic work popularized the linear growth model. One version of this model is called the "Rk" model, where k stands for capital and R for Rebelo.

Sérgio Rebelo is now the Tokai Bank Distinguished Professor of Finance at Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University.

Besides being an outstanding economist, Sérgio Rebelo is also a watercolor painter as well as a great musician.

Margarida Duarte (August 3rd, 1998)