It is very unusual to find married couples in the field of economics, but it is an
amazement there are two couples from California that  have  such significant
influence on the economy.  Such is the case with David and Christina Romer
and David Ackerlof and his wife, Janet Yellen, the new Vice Chair of the Federal
Reserve.  The following is a short overview on their persnonnel and professional
lives.

                               Professors David and Christina Romer

 David and Christina were classmates at MIT and both teach Economics at University
of California, Berkeley. They have adjoining offices in the department and
collaborate on much of their research.  The couple has three children together.
They are not related to Paul Romer, the economist famous for his work on economic
growth, although they have a son with the same name.

David Romer (born 1958) is Professor of Political Economy at the University of
California, Berkeley. He obtained his bachelor's degree from Princeton University
in 1980, graduating as the valedictorian of his class, and worked as a Junior
Staff Economist at the Council of Economic Advisers during 1980-1981, before
beginning his Ph.D. at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which he completed
in 1985. His undergraduate thesis research was published in the Review of Economics
and Statistics. Upon completion of his doctorate, he started working as an assistant
professor at Princeton University. In 1988 he moved to University of California,
Berkeley and was promoted to full professor in 1993.

David is co-director of the Program in Monetary Economics at the National Bureau of
Economic Research, and is a member of the NBER Business Cycle Dating Committee

He is known at Berkeley for offering graduate students his "Chicken Soup for
Economists," including such advice as "A model should be as simple as possible while
still showing the effect we are interested in", "Cite others work appropriately",
"A good paper almost always contains a viewpoint, a lever, and hard work," and "If
you find yourself thinking 'But that's how the game is played,' slap yourself. If
that doesn't work, take up sheep farming."

Christina Romer (maiden name Duckworth; born December 25, 1958) Professor of
Economics at the University of California, Berkeley and the recent Chair of the Council
of Economic Advisers in the Obama administration. She resigned from her role on the
Council of Economic Advisers on September 3, 2010.

She was born in Alton, Illinois. She obtained her bachelor's degree in economics from
William & Mary in 1981, and her Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
in 1985. Upon completion of her doctorate, she started working as an assistant professor
at Princeton University. In 1988 she moved to the University of California, Berkeley
and was promoted to full professor in 1993.

                            Professors David Akerlof and Janet Yellen

 David Akerlof and Janet Yellen met while they were at the Federal Reserve Board in
Washington DC.  They taught together at the London School of Economics, and at the
University of California, Berkeley.  The couple has a son.

George Arthur Akerlof (born June 17, 1940) is Professor of Economics at the University
of California, Berkeley. He won the 2001 Nobel Prize in Economics (shared with Michael
Spence and Joseph E. Stiglitz). Akerlof received his B.A. degree from Yale University
in 1962 and his Ph.D. degree from MIT in 1966, and has taught at the London School of
Economics.

Janet Yellen (born August 13, 1946) is Vice Chair of the Federal Reserve Board. She
graduated magna cum laude from Brown University with a degree in economics in 1967,
and received her Ph.D. in economics from Yale University in 1971. She became Vice
Chair of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System on October 4, 2010,
for a 4-year term ending October 4, 2014. Dr. Yellen simultaneously began a 14-year
term as a member of the Federal Reserve Board that will expire January 31, 2024.
Prior to her appointment as Vice Chair, Dr. Yellen served as President and Chief
Executive Officer of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. She was a voting
member of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) in 2009. Dr. Yellen is also
Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley's Haas School of Business,
where she was a faculty member since 1980. From 1997 to 1999, she was Chair of the
White House Council of Economic Advisers under the Clinton Administration.

Akerlof describes how they met in his autobiography, prepared for the Nobel Prize:
In between Berkeley and the London School of Economics, LSE I spent a year at the
Federal Reserve Board in Washington, D.C., where I met Janet Yellen. We liked each
other immediately and decided to get married. Not only did our personalities mesh
perfectly, but we have also always been in all but perfect agreement about macro
economics. Our lone disagreement is that she is a bit more supportive of free trade
than I. We decided to get married hastily, not only because we had so little doubt
about each other, but also for practical reasons. I had already accepted a
professorship at the LSE for the coming year and if we were to avoid being separated,
Janet would also need to get a job in England too. Luckily, she also was given a
tenure-track lectureship at the LSE. There seemed to be no question about her
tenure since she had already published several distinguished articles on the economics
of bundling and advertising. After a year in Washington, we left for England. We very
much liked both the LSE and London, but both of us had problems of identity: we were
American, not English. Luckily, Berkeley had never accepted my proffer of resignation
when I left for the LSE, so I was still nominally on the faculty. And Janet got a
tenure-track job in the business school with a promise of early review for tenure.
We had met at the Fed in the Fall of 1977, married in June 1978, and left for the
LSE in September of that year. We came back to Berkeley in August 1980. Shortly
thereafter, in June 1981, our son Robert was born.

A decisive couple, but not identical as illustrated in a 1997, a Business Week
article where Yellen describes their different personal styles:

In academic circles, Yellen and Akerlof -- who met in 1977 as young Fed economists
and were married the next year--have won acclaim for the originality of their
research, to say nothing of their clout...colleagues say Akerlof often comes up
with breakthrough ideas, but it is Yellen who supplies the academic rigor. "Akerlof
is more interested in the inspiration than the hard work of putting it together in
a professionally plausible form--he's off to the next idea,'' says Tobin. "She provides
the discipline that makes them go."