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Susan Doolittle (202) 463-6223

For Immediate Release:  Sept. 10, 2000

Budget Expert Alice Rivlin Tapped for NABE’S Adam Smith Award

            CHICAGO – Alice Rivlin, an economist whose innovative ideas helped reshape the fiscal priorities of the nation and the nation’s capital, will receive the National Association for Business Economics’ highest honor, the Adam Smith Award, at the association’s September annual meeting in Chicago.

Rivlin, who is a senior fellow in the economic studies program at the Brookings Institution and chair of the District of Columbia Financial Management Assistance Authority, will deliver the Adam Smith lecture at an awards luncheon on Sept. 12 during NABE’s annual meeting in Chicago.

The Adam Smith Award, named for the 18^th century Scottish thinker whose ideas about economics (Wealth of Nations) led to the growth of modern capitalism, is presented annually to an outstanding economist whose ideas have contributed to the development of sound public policy and to improvements in the workplace.

“Alice Rivlin is deserving on so many grounds that it is hard to isolate one outstanding achievement,” said NABE President Diane M. Swonk, chief economist for Bank One Corp. “She fought for deficit reduction when it was not a very popular political cause. She tries to keep economics out of the political fray. She is also a great human being and never forgets that economics is at its heart a study of human nature.”

Rivlin’s career as an economist, teacher, public servant, writer, and think-tank expert spans nearly four decades. A former vice chair of the Federal Reserve Board (1996-99), she has held most key economic posts in Washington. She is particularly proud of her work as founding director of the Congressional Budget Office, which she headed from 1975 to 1983. “Congress felt it was at the mercy of the executive branch,” she said. “It needed a nonpartisan organization to provide high-quality economic analyses of options to help in decision-making on budget and policy matters.”

As director of the Office of Management and Budget from 1994-96 and deputy director before that, “she played a key role in pushing the Clinton administration toward fiscal policy that many economists credit with prolonging the current U.S. expansion,” according to the Washington Post.    Educated at Bryn Mawr and Harvard (Ph.D. in economics, 1958), Rivlin has taught at Harvard and George Mason University and served on the boards of several corporations. Her many honors include a 1983 MacArthur Foundation prize fellowship.

            Although she does not describe herself as a feminist, she is a pioneer. She was the first and to date, the only woman director of the OMB, and the first and only woman to head the American Economic Association in its 115-year history.

A NABE fellow and long-time NABE member, Rivlin is also the first woman to receive NABE’s Adam Smith award since its inception in 1982. Past recipients include the late Herbert Stein, Charles P. Kindleberger, Karl Brunner, Robert M. Solow, Paul W. McCracken, George J. Stigler, James M. Buchanan, Milton Friedman, James Tobin, Gary S. Becker, Vaclav Klaus, Martin Feldstein, Douglass C. North, Paul R. Krugman, Murray L. Weidenbaum, Michael E. Porter, Michael J. Boskin, and Alan S. Blinder.

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