Susan M. Collins (economist)

Collins was born in Jamaica and raised in Manhattan.[2] She received her B.A. in economics summa cum laude from Harvard University in 1980, and her Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1984. She has held various teaching positions at Harvard, Georgetown University and the University of Michigan, and also served on the President's Council of Economic Advisers from 1989 to 1990 and was a visiting scholar at the International Monetary Fund in 2001.[3]

Collins is the Edward M. Gramlich Professor of Public Policy and a professor of economics at the University of Michigan, where she also served as dean of the Ford School from 2007 to 2017.[4] She is a nonresident senior fellow in the Economic Studies program at the Brookings Institution[5] and is a member on the board of directors at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago.[6]

Collins was involved in the controversy surrounding the University of Michigan's reopening during the COVID-19 pandemic. On September 8, 2020, the university's graduate student employees went on strike because of concerns related to the university's pandemic response.[7] As the university's chief academic officer, Collins was involved in negotiations with the graduate students while also urging students not to disrupt campus operations and claiming that the strike was illegal because it was not directly related to "wages, hours, or working conditions." The students disagreed, claiming that the strike directly related to the university's failure to provide a safe working environment which was required by the contract it agreed to only months prior.[8] In a publicly broadcast question and answer session on September 15, 2020, Collins said of the administration's pandemic response: “We have not done nearly as well as we needed to.”[9]

In February 2022, Collins was selected to become president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, becoming the first Black woman and the first woman of color to lead any of the 12 regional Federal bank branches.[10]

• Bosworth, Barry, and Susan M. Collins. "Accounting for growth: comparing China and India." Journal of Economic Perspectives 22, no. 1 (2008): 45–66.
• Collins, Susan M., Barry P. Bosworth, and Dani Rodrik. "Economic growth in East Asia: accumulation versus assimilation." Brookings papers on economic activity 1996, no. 2 (1996): 135–203.
• Bosworth, Barry P., Susan M. Collins, and Carmen M. Reinhart. "Capital flows to developing economies: implications for saving and investment." Brookings papers on economic activity 1999, no. 1 (1999): 143–180.
• Razin, Ofair, and Susan M. Collins. Real exchange rate misalignments and growth. No. w6174. National Bureau of Economic Research, 1997.
• Collins, Susan M. "On becoming more flexible: Exchange rate regimes in Latin America and the Caribbean." Journal of Development Economics 51, no. 1 (1996): 117–138.