Paul Romer, an economist and policy entrepreneur, is a University Professor on leave from NYU. Romer was the former Director of the Marron Institute and the founding director of the Urbanization Project at the Leonard N. Stern School of Business. The Urbanization Project conducts applied research on the many ways in which policymakers in the developing world can use the rapid growth of cities to create economic opportunity and undertake systemic social reform.
Before coming to NYU, Paul taught at Stanford University's Graduate School of Business. Paul also taught in the economics departments at the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Chicago, and the University of Rochester. He is a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is a non-resident scholar at both the Center for Global Development in Washington, D.C. and the Macdonald Laurier Institute in Ottawa, Ontario.
Romer was the co-recipient, with Yale's William Nordhaus, of the 2018 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. In 2002, he received the Recktenwald Prize for his work on the role of ideas in sustaining economic growth.
Paul earned a bachelor of science in mathematics from the University of Chicago. He earned a doctorate in economics from the University of Chicago after doing graduate work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Queens University.