Anna Jacobson Schwartz died at her Manhattan home on June 21, 2012, at age 96, after more than seven decades at the National Bureau of Economic Research.
Anna Jacobson Schwartz died on June 21, 2012, at her home in Manhattan, New York City, at the age of 96. Her death marked the end of one of the longest and most productive careers in the history of economic research — she had worked at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) continuously since 1941, over seventy years.
At the time of her death, Schwartz was still remembered as an active and sharp intellectual presence in monetary economics, having testified before Congress and remained publicly engaged with debates over the 2008 financial crisis well into her nineties. Her longevity in active scholarship was itself remarkable, spanning from the Great Depression era to the aftermath of the Great Recession.
Tributes poured in from economists, policymakers, and institutions such as the Cato Institute, the American Economic Association, and the NBER, recognizing her foundational contributions to monetary theory, particularly her co-authorship of A Monetary History of the United States with Milton Friedman. Many commentators lamented that she had never received a Nobel Prize despite her towering influence on the field — an omission attributed in part to gender bias in economics during her era.
Her death was widely covered in major financial and academic press, cementing her legacy as one of the most significant, if historically underrecognized, women in the history of economics.