Atif Mian

Atif Rehman Mian is a Pakistani-American economist, born on 28 June 1975, who serves as the John H. Laporte Jr. Class of 1967 Professor of Economics, Public Policy and Finance at Princeton University and as director of the Julis-Rabinowitz Center for Public Policy and Finance at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs. His work studies the connections between finance and the macroeconomy. The International Monetary Fund named him in 2014 among twenty-five young economists expected to shape global economic thinking, and he received a Guggenheim Fellowship and was elected a Fellow of the Econometric Society in 2021. ^{1 2}

In September 2018 Prime Minister Imran Khan appointed Mian — described in the article's text as "an Ahmadi Muslim" — to Pakistan's Economic Advisory Council. Groups opposed to government representation for religious minorities campaigned against the appointment, and he was asked to resign a week later. Two fellow members, Asim Ijaz Khwaja and Imran Rasul, resigned from the council in protest, and the removal drew condemnation from economists worldwide, including an open letter signed by leading economists and Nobel laureates; The Economist and the Financial Times also criticised the decision. ^{1 3}

Mian was born in Pakistan to Ahmadi parents who were government physicians, and he grew up and received most of his early education in Pakistan. At seventeen he won a scholarship to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he began in engineering and shifted to mathematics and computer science before turning to economics. He completed his undergraduate degree in 1996, briefly attended Princeton, and returned to MIT to earn his PhD in 2001 with a dissertation on banking and governance. ¹

Before Princeton, Mian taught at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business and at the University of California, Berkeley. His research examines how finance and debt shape the real economy, and he is a leading voice on the role of household debt in recessions. ¹

With Amir Sufi he wrote House of Debt (University of Chicago Press, 2014), which argued that the Great Recession was caused by household debt rather than by failing banks, as the Bush and Obama administrations had diagnosed. The book was shortlisted for the Financial Times Business Book of the Year and won the Gordon J. Laing Prize of the University of Chicago Press. ¹

Mian married his wife Ayesha, whom he had known since childhood, around 1999; they have three children. ¹

• The defined source entities cited above, recorded in data/source/.
• Revisions of this article must be dated, and must name the source that changed each fact.