Gokhale to Join Cato Social Security Team

December 8, 2003

Jagadeesh Gokhale, one of the nation's leading economists and an expert on entitlement reform, has joined the Cato Institute as a senior fellow. Gokhale, former senior economic adviser to the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, has been on leave from the Fed for the past year, serving as a visiting scholar with the American Enterprise Institute. Gokhale will work with Cato's Project on Social Security Choice, examining the problems of the current Social Security system and helping to design market-based alternatives.

Gokhale's is widely recognized as one of the nation's leading experts on U.S. fiscal policy and its intergenerational impact. His analysis of the sustainability of entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare was published in the Budget of the United States Government (1993, 1994, and 1995), and he has testified before the Senate Budget Committee on Social Security's treatment of postwar U.S. generations. In related work, Gokhale has studied how fiscal policy affects national saving and the accumulation and distribution of wealth. Gokhale has also constructed computer simulations to study the causes of wealth inequality in the United States with a special focus on the role of bequests in transmitting wealth inequality across successive generations.

Gokhale has been widely published in top academic journals such as the Journal of Economic Perspectives, Quarterly Journal of Economics, Review of Economics and Statistics, and the Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, as well as in several publications of the National Bureau of Economic Research and of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland. His latest book, Fiscal and Generational Imbalances: New Budget Measures for New Budget Priorities, coauthored with Kent Smetters, was released by AEI this past June. Gokhale is also the author of "The Impact of Social Security Reform on Low-Income Workers" and coauthor of "Social Security Privatization: One Proposal" (with David Altig), both Cato Institute Social Security Choice Papers.

Gokhale received his PhD in economics from Boston University.

"We are excited to have someone of Jagadeesh Gokhale's skill and reputation join our team," said Michael Tanner, director of the Cato project. "With the imperative of Social Security reform moving ever closer, Jagadeesh's skill and enthusiasm will be invaluable."

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