Peter Kenen

Who was Peter Kenen?

Peter B. Kenen was a Senior Fellow in International Economics at the Council on Foreign Relations and Walker Professor of Economics and International Finance at Princeton University.

Kenen was born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1932, and attended The Bronx High School of Science. He earned his B.A. from Columbia University in 1954 and his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1958. He taught at Columbia from 1957 to 1971, where he served as Chairman of the Department of Economics and was named as Provost of the University. While at Columbia, Kenen was a resident of Teaneck, New Jersey.

He was Director of the International Finance Section at Princeton from 1971 to 1999. He is best known for his work on the theory of optimum currency areas, in which he argued that groups of countries with diversified domestic production are more likely to constitute optimum currency areas than groups whose members are highly specialized. He was one of the first to advocate floating exchange rates for small countries.

Kenen’s publications include British Monetary Policy and the Balance of Payments, which won the David A. Wells Prize at Harvard; Asset Markets, Exchange Rates and Economic Integration; The Theory of Optimum Currency Areas: An Eclectic View; Managing Exchange Rates; Economic and Monetary Union in Europe; The International Financial Architecture; and International Economic and Financial Cooperation. Recent publications include Regional Monetary Integration, published in 2008. He edited several books, including Managing the World Economy and Understanding Interdependence, and was co editor of the two volume Handbook of International Economics. He published numerous articles in scholarly journals, many of which have been reprinted in two volumes: Essays in International Economics and Exchange Rates and the Monetary System.