From Babysitting to the Federal Reserve

For Catherine L. Mann ’77, a career in economics—including positions with the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors and the President’s Council of Economic Advisers—began with babysitting.

Put in simple economic terms, the laws of supply and demand led the vice president of an econometric forecasting firm to offer his children’s babysitter a summer job entering data into his company’s primitive computers during the early ’70s.

A Harvard degree and MIT PhD later, Mann has found herself shaping economic policy at some of the nation’s most powerful policy making institutions, in addition to starting a family of her own.

She currently serves as a senior fellow at the Institute for International Economics, an independent non-profit thinktank in Washington D.C.

“In terms of her successful career as an economist, [Mann] has benefited from her perseverance as well as her ability to think independently,” says Susan M. Collins ’80, who attended graduate school with Mann at MIT and is now a professor of economics at Georgetown University.

Mann’s current research focuses on the ways in which technology issues affect international economic policies.

She says she often travels to developing countries, including India, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, to explain to their policy makers how technology is important to their growth.

As an example of technology’s economic importance, Mann describes the way in which the Internet can communicate data about diseases and lead to prevention and eradication in certain countries.

“I really believe that I’m helping policy to be better, and that better policy means better outcome for individuals and for countries,” she says.

While Mann says she has always focused on international economic issues, her specialization in technology has developed recently with the technological boom.

At the Federal Reserve, where she worked as the assistant director in the international finance division until 1997, she says she focused on issues such as GDP growth and exchange rates.

But Mann says she was drawn to the Institute, where she currently works, because it gave her more freedom and opportunities in her research.

A Worthwhile Investment

Mann says she spent much of her time at Harvard working at WHRB, the campus radio station.

It was there that she met her husband, of 18 years Randy E. Hartnett ’74, who is an Internet entrepreneur.

The two live in Virginia with their 9-year-old son.

Mann says that she and her friends from WHRB would often go out for late-night “feeds” after the late news, around midnight.

“On occasion, this involved driving to Junior Cheesecake in New York City, or sometimes Provincetown, or depending on how late it was, to the North End to get fresh bread a Bova’s bakery,” she says.

Mann also fondly recalls her job working in the stacks of Widener Library.

“I had my own carrel on the side opposite J. August’s, two flights down,” she says. “I just loved being in the library.”

Mann, who concentrated in economics, was placed in Matthews South as a first-year, lived in Eliot House for two years and then spent one year in North House.

She says that two of her professors—Rachel McCulloch and Janet Yellen—are now her “close colleagues.”

“[Mann] is smart, assertive, energetic, organized and hard-working. Those are qualities that go far in determining professional success,” McCulloch, now a professor at Brandeis, says. “I also think she has been rather adventurous in following a career track that is not typical of MIT PhDs in economics.”

Mann says that she continues to reap the benefits of her Harvard education.

“The network and pedigree get more important later in life,” she says.

Taking Stock of Her Options

In addition to making and researching economic policy, Mann has made her mark on the academic community as a professor and author.

She has co-authored several books, including The New Economy and APEC and Global Electronic Commerce: A Policy Primer.

She is currently teaching at the Johns Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies while on leave from the Owen School of Management at Vanderbilt University, where she is an adjunct professor of management.

Mann has received the Federal Reserve’s special achievement award and was recognized at Vanderbilt for excellence in teaching.

McCulloch says she would “love to add her” to the Brandeis faculty.

Mann, a Lexington, Mass. native, says that returning to Harvard as a professor “has crossed [her] mind a number of times,” especially since her family still lives in the area.

“It’s a tough place to get an offer, but I would come back to the Kennedy School or the Business School if there were a reasonable offer,” she says.

But for now, Mann says she is enjoying the opportunities that her work at the Institute provides.

She recently received a $150,000 grant from the Ford Foundation to fund her work and research.

With her husband’s 25th reunion and WHRB’s 50th reunion behind her, Mann says she is excited to reunite with members of her class.

“For my husband’s 25th, we weren’t sure we were going to go, but we had a blast,” she says. “Even with people you weren’t particularly good friends with 25 years ago, you do have a common, automatic bond.”

—Staff writer Jenifer L. Steinhardt can be reached at steinhar@fas.harvard.edu.