Michael R. Strain
Director of Economic Policy Studies and Paul F. Oreffice Senior Fellow in Political Economy, American Enterprise Institute
Michael R. Strain is Director of Economic Policy Studies and Paul F. Oreffice Senior Fellow in Political Economy at the American Enterprise Institute. He is also Professor of Practice in the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University.
Dr. Strain’s research and writing is in a wide range of areas, including labor markets, public finance, social policy, and macroeconomics. He has published over 50 scholarly articles in academic and policy journals and is the editor of four books on economic and policy issues. He is the author of The American Dream Is Not Dead: (But Populism Could Kill It), which analyzes longer-term trends in economic outcomes for workers and households.
He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and of the Aspen Economic Strategy Group, and serves on the Board of Directors of the American Academy of Political & Social Science. He is a research fellow with the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) in Bonn and a research affiliate with the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He was a member of the AEI-Brookings Working Group on Poverty and Opportunity, which published the report “Opportunity, Responsibility, and Security: A Consensus Plan for Reducing Poverty and Restoring the American Dream” and of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine committee that published the report, “Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Work.”
Dr. Strain has published over 350 essays and columns on economics and public policy, including in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, The Washington Post, Bloomberg, and National Review, among others. He is a columnist for Project Syndicate. He is regularly interviewed on podcasts and by broadcast news networks, and has testified before Congress, having appeared as an expert witness before six House and Senate committees.
At AEI, Dr. Strain oversees the Institute’s work in economic policy, macroeconomics, financial markets, international trade and finance, tax and budget policy, welfare economics, health care policy, and related areas. He is a member of the Institute’s executive leadership committee.
He holds a Ph.D. in economics from Cornell, and lives in Washington.