Roger Farmer

{{short description|American economist}}

{{about||the American football wide receiver|Roger Farmer (American football)}}

{{Infobox economist

| name = Roger E. A. Farmer

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| birth_date = {{birth date and age|1955|4|4|mf=y}}

| birth_place = England

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| nationality = British-American

| institutions = University of Warwick, University of California, Los Angeles (Distinguished Emeritus)

| field = Economics

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| alma_mater = University of Western Ontario

| doctoral_advisor = Joel Fried
Michael Parkin
Peter Howitt

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| repec_prefix = e

| repec_id = pfa3

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}}

Roger Edward Alfred Farmer is a British/American economist. He is currently a professor at the University of Warwick{{Cite web|url=https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/staff/reafarmer/|title = Roger Farmer}} and is a Distinguished Emeritus Professor and former Chair of the Economics department at the University of California, Los Angeles.[https://economics.ucla.edu/person/roger-e-farmer/ UCLA Economics bio] He has also held positions at the University of Pennsylvania, the European University Institute and the University of Toronto. He is a Fellow of the Econometric Society, Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, and Research Fellow of the Centre for Economic Policy Research, and the former Research Director of the National Institute of Economic and Social Research (NIESR). He was made a Fellow of the Royal Economic Society in May 2025.https://res.org.uk/the-royal-economic-society-announces-founding-fellows/ In 2013, he was the Senior Houblon-Norman Fellow at the Bank of England. He is internationally recognized for his work on self-fulfilling prophecies.{{cite book |last=Farmer|first=Roger E. A. | author-link=Roger Farmer | title=Macroeconomics of Self-fulfilling Prophecies |publisher=The MIT Press; second edition |year=1999 |isbn=978-0262062039}} Farmer has published several scholarly articles in leading academic journals. He is also a co-founder of the Indeterminacy School in Macroeconomics.{{cite encyclopedia |title=The Indeterminacy School of Macroeconomics |encyclopedia=Oxford Research Encyclopaedia of Economics and Finance |year=2020 |url=https://oxfordre.com/economics/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190625979.001.0001/acrefore-9780190625979-e-511 | doi=10.1093/acrefore/9780190625979.013.511|last1=Farmer |first1=Roger E. A. |isbn=9780190625979 |s2cid=219367550 }} His body of work has advanced the view that beliefs are a new fundamental in economics that have the same methodological status as preferences, technology, and endowments.{{cite journal| title=The Importance of Beliefs in Shaping Macroeconomic Outcomes |journal=Oxford Review of Economic Policy |date=May 2020 |doi=10.3386/w26557 | url=https://www.nber.org/papers/w26557|last1=Farmer |first1=Roger |series=Working Paper Series |s2cid=209177581 }} In his 1993 book, Macroeconomics of Self-fulfilling Prophecies,{{cite book |last=Farmer|first=Roger E. A. | author-link=Roger Farmer | title=Macroeconomics of Self-fulfilling Prophecies |publisher=The MIT Press; second edition |year=1999 | pages=223–225 | isbn=978-0262062039}} he argues that beliefs should be modeled with the introduction of a Belief Function, which explains how people form ideas about the future based on things they have seen in the past. In his 2010 book, Expectations, Employment and Prices,{{cite book |last=Farmer|first=Roger E. A. | author-link=Roger Farmer | title=Expectations, Employment and Prices |publisher=Oxford University Press |year=2010 |isbn=978-0195397901}} he suggests an alternative paradigm to New Keynesian economics which reintroduces a central idea from John Maynard Keynes' The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money; that high involuntary unemployment can persist as a permanent equilibrium outcome. He provided an accessible introduction to these ideas in his 2010 book How the Economy Works,{{cite book |last=Farmer|first=Roger E. A. | author-link=Roger Farmer | title=How the Economy Works |publisher=Oxford University Press |year=2010 |isbn=978-0199360307}} and more recently, in his 2016 book Prosperity for All,{{cite book |last=Farmer|first=Roger E. A. | author-link=Roger Farmer | title=Prosperity for All |publisher=Oxford University Press |year=2016 |isbn=978-0190922405}} both of which were written for a general audience. The Farmer Monetary Model has different and high policy implications and relevance. Farmer's policy proposal to achieve full employment by controlling and stabilizing asset prices shows promise as a way to help prevent stock market crashes and deep recessions. His son is the economist Leland Edward Farmer, who joined the faculty at the University of Virginia in July 2017.{{Cite web|url=https://economics.virginia.edu/people/profile/lef2u|title=| Department of Economics}}