Mundell is a name that macroeconomics students need to be familiar with.
He won the Nobel Prize in 1999, largely for integrating international economics into macroeconomics in the early 1960s.
At the IMF between 1961-63, Mundell added a crucial model to existing views of closed, or self-contained, national economies.The effects of economic policies depend crucially on the exchange-rate regime, he demonstrated: floating rates made monetary policy powerful and denatured fiscal policy, whereas with fixed exchange rates the reverse is true. Encapsulated by a pair of equations, described by a couple of intersecting curves, the Mundell-Fleming model (Marcus Fleming, his IMF boss, died in 1976), brought Samuelsonian clarity to the analysis of international finance.
He is also called the "father of the Euro" for providing the insights that indicated that a European monetary union was workable.
And he was very influential in the exposition of "supply side economics" to the Reagan and Thatcher administrations in the early 80s.
There are obituaries around, but this piece from about 10 years ago covers the important stuff well.
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