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She went on to earn a Ph.D. at Yale under legendary Keynesian scholar James Tobin, who taught her and other students that economics should, as she puts it, be "about caring for real people." As Tobin's teaching assistant, she learned the lessons so well that her class notes became the template for the grand master's macroeconomics course. "Those notes were so good, they were circulated for years," says Jeffrey Shafer, an economic consultant and former Treasury Under Secretary who was a close friend of Yellen's at Yale and Tobin's teaching assistant the year after her. Harvard professor and conservative economist Ken Rogoff, a beneficiary of those notes in the same class several years later, remembers, "Tobin just handed them out and said, 'Use these. They are a lot better than my own.' Janet was so clear and so able to take these really complex ideas and make them understandable."
Yellen's intellectually formative years came in the late 1960s, a time before trickle-down economic theory had become the conventional wisdom. At Yale she studied under liberal economist Joseph Stiglitz, who remembers her as "one of my best-ever students." Stiglitz, whose work focused on how markets aren't really as efficient as people think, would go on to share the Nobel Prize with another questioner of the conventional wisdom around efficient markets, George Akerlof--who would eventually become Yellen's husband.
Yellen and Akerlof met and fell in love in the Fed cafeteria in 1977, when Akerlof was a visiting scholar for a year while Yellen was a rookie research staffer. "We went to a seminar together and then took the speaker out for lunch, and there were too many people to fit at the table, so we ended up at a spillover table," she says with a smile. "And we just totally hit it off. Our views and our personalities meshed so well. That was November. By New Year's Eve, we were engaged."
Yellen says Akerlof (along with Tobin) has been her biggest intellectual influence. She also says Akerlof has been her No. 1 supporter and fan, enabling her to balance motherhood with a top-tier academic career. (Their son Robert, 32, is an economics professor at England's University of Warwick.) The two traveled the world together on parallel careers in the U.K.; Berkeley, Calif.; San Francisco; and Washington, with Akerlof taking teaching jobs geographically suited to Yellen's policy work. "Academia is very flexible, but I had a spouse who was very committed to being a completely full partner in our marriage," says Yellen. Meaning that he also changed the diapers and did the dishes? "Oh yeah, the whole deal. I think if you counted up how many hours each one of us logged in, he certainly gets more than 50%," she says.