Janet Louise Yellen is an American economist serving as the 78th United States Secretary of the Treasury since January 26, 2021. She previously served as the 15th chair of the Federal Reserve from 2014 to 2018.

Who is George Akerlof, the husband of Janet Yellen?

Janet Yellen married her husband George Arthur Akerlof, who is an American economist and a university professor at the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University, and Koshland Professor of Economics Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley.

Akerlof was born in New Haven, Connecticut, on June 17, 1940, into a Jewish family. His mother was Rosalie Clara Grubber (née Hirschfelder), a housewife of German Jewish descent, and his father was Gösta Carl Åkerlöf, a chemist and inventor, who was a Swedish immigrant. George has an older brother, Carl, a physics professor at the University of Michigan.

Akerlof attended Princeton Day School before he graduated from the Lawrenceville School in 1958. He received a bachelor’s in economics from Yale University in 1962 and earned his Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1966. His dissertation was titled Wages and Capital under the supervision of Robert Solow, a noted economist who would later receive the Nobel Memorial Prize.

Akerlof was briefly married to an architect, Kay Leong; they wedded in 1974 and divorced three years later after he didn’t get promoted to a full professorship at Berkeley. Following their divorce, Kay moved to New York and remarried a fellow architect. In 1978, Akerlof married Janet Yellen, an economist who is the current United States Secretary of the Treasury and former chair of the Federal Reserve, as well as a professor emeritus at Berkeley’s Haas School of Business.

They have one child, a son named Robert, who was born in 1981. Robert Akerlof is also an economist, who earned a bachelor’s degree in economics and mathematics from Yale University and obtained his Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University, currently working as an associate professor of economics at the University of Warwick.

Source: Ghanafuo.com