Tobias Adrian

Tobias Adrian (born 23 July 1971) is a German and American economist who has been Financial Counsellor of the International Monetary Fund and Head of their Monetary and Capital Markets Department since 2017.

He was previously employed at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, where he was a Senior Vice President and the Associate Director of the Research and Statistics Group.

His research covers aspects of risk to the wider economy of developments in capital markets.

His work has covered the global financial crisis, monetary policy transmission, and the yield curve.

Adrian was born in Kronberg, West Germany and attended Humboldtschule, Bad Homburg.

After studying at Goethe University Frankfurt, Paris Dauphine University, and the London School of Economics, he studied for a Ph.D. at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, graduating in 2003.

His doctoral thesis was entitled "Learning, dynamics of beliefs, and asset pricing".

While working at the Federal Reserve, Adrian made substantial contributions to the role of financial intermediaries in monetary policy transmission, with Hyun-Song Shin.

He also documented how the inversion of the yield curve can be viewed as a causal transmission channel for monetary policy tightening, with Hyun-Song Shin and Arturo Estrella.

This is based on earlier work with Estrella that documented the forecasting power of the yield curve.

Adrian also worked on widely adopted yield curve models with Richard Crump and Emanuel Moench.

Together with Markus Brunnermeier of Princeton University, Adrian created one of the first measures of systemic risk, the CoVaR.

This measure, which takes into account spillover and contagion effects between asset classes and industries, was used to stress test banks following the great recession.

Adrian has published extensively on the topic of market liquidity, including policy effects and its procyclical behavior.

He has also written on the importance of the shadow banking system in capital markets, and its prominent role in the development of the financial crisis of 2007–2008.

More recently, Adrian has studied how financial conditions present asymmetric risks to GDP growth with Domenico Giannone and Nina Boyarchenko.

This work led to a novel model for economic forecasting, under which multimodal distributions (allowing both "good" and "bad" outcomes) arise naturally under tight financial conditions.

With Patrick Bolton and Alissa Kleinnijenhuis, Adrian has conducted a first empirical study of the costs and benefits of phasing out coal around the world, and documented a large net social gain on the order of trillions.

Their work establishes a novel economic foundation for climate finance.