Michael Mussa, chief IMF economist from 1991-2001 and an advisor to US president Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, has died of a heart attack at age 67, according to the institute where he worked. Mussa served at the International Monetary Fund during the Russian and Southeast Asian economic crises of the 1990s and criticised the world lender for its failure to avert Argentina's catastrophic debt default in 2002.
A statement posted on the website of the Washington-based Peterson Institute for International Economics said Mussa, who worked for the institute up until his death on Sunday, "was known for unsparing analysis and deep intellectual curiosity and knowledge about a full range of subjects."
Born in 1944, Mussa earned his PhD at the University of Chicago in 1974 and went on to serve on the faculty at the Graduate School of Business of the University of Chicago and at the University of Rochester. He is credited with being one of the first economists to demonstrate how the short-run variability of exchange rates differed systematically under alternative currency regimes.
He also advanced economists' understanding of how expectations render the behaviour of exchange rates similar to that of other asset prices, and how official intervention in exchange markets could affect rates. He served as a member of Reagan's Council of Economic Advisers from 1986-1988 before joining the IMF in 1991.
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