Claudia Sahm

Claudia Rae Sahm (née Foster) is an American economist, leading the Macroeconomic Research initiative of the Jain Family Institute. She was formerly director of macroeconomic policy at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, and a Section Chief at the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, where she worked in various capacities from 2007 to 2019. Sahm specializes in macroeconomics and household finance. She is best known for the development of the Sahm Rule, a Federal Reserve Economic Data (FRED) indicator for identifying recessions in real-time. Education and career In 1998, Sahm received a bachelor's degree in economics from Denison University, where she also studied political science and German. From 1998 to 1999, Sahm was a Fulbright Scholar at the Technical University of Dresden, where she studied economic transitions in post-socialist countries. From 1999 to 2001, Sahm worked at the Brookings Institution as a research assistant. Sahm began her PhD at the University of Michigan in 2001, guided by Matthew D. Shapiro and Miles Spencer Kimball, completing her thesis Risk, Tolerance and Asset Allocation in 2007. In 2007, Sahm began working at the Federal Reserve Board of Governors as an economist, where her work was focused on examining consumer spending. Her first position was studying the impact of tax rebates. In 2013 she was promoted to Senior Economist, and in 2015 to Principal Economist, at the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. Sahm was a Senior Economist at the Council of Economic Advisers for the Obama administration, where she worked on macroeconomic developments and housing policy from 2015 to 2016. She studied the impact of unusual weather on economic data. She showed that people were less willing to take economic risks as they age.