Robert James Hodrick is a U.S. economist
specialized in International Finance. AB, Princeton, 1972; PhD, University of Chicago, 1976.
Until 1983, he served as a professor at Carnegie-Mellon University, where he worked jointly with Edward C. Prescott

Edward C. Prescott

Edward Christian Prescott is an American economist. He received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics in 2004, sharing the award with Finn E. Kydland, "for their contributions to dynamic macroeconomics: the time consistency of economic policy and the driving forces behind business cycles"...

 on business cycle, and developed the Hodrick-Prescott filter

Hodrick-Prescott filter

The Hodrick–Prescott filter is a mathematical tool used in macroeconomics, especially in real business cycle theory to separate the cyclical component of a time series from raw data. It is used to obtain a smoothed-curve representation of a time series, one that is more sensitive to long-term than...

 to distinguish trends from cyclical fluctuations.
He taught at Northwestern University

Northwestern University

Northwestern University is a private research university in Evanston and Chicago, Illinois, USA. Northwestern has eleven undergraduate, graduate, and professional schools offering 124 undergraduate degrees and 145 graduate and professional degrees....

 and joined Columbia University

Columbia University

Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...

in 1996.