Sumru Altug is Professor and Chair at the American University of Beirut and a Research Fellow at the CEPR, London, UK where she specializes in macroeconomics, financial economics and econometrics.
She has written papers on business cycles, intertemporal models of consumption and labor supply, productivity and growth, investment, irreversible investment, investment and tax policy, and investment and political risk. She has published papers at top and field economics journals, including papers in International Economic Review, Econometrica, Review of Economic Studies, Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Macroeconomic Dynamics, Economic Theory, Journal of Macroeconomics, Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, European Review of Economic History, Review of Economic Dynamics, Oxford Bullein of Economics and Statistics, Frontiers in Physics: Social Physics, among others. She has co-authored or co-edited five texts in macroeconomics and finance, including Dynamic Macroeconomic Analysis: Theory and Policy in General Equilibrium and Asset Pricing for Dynamic Economies from Cambridge University Press in 2003 and 2008, respectively.
Sumru Altug has a PhD from Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh, PA and she was on the faculty of the Department of Economics at the University of Minnesota between 1984-1994. She held associate and full professor positions at Koç University in Istanbul, Turkey between 1995-1999 and 2002-2018, respectively, and professorial positions at the Universities of Durham and York in the UK between 1999-2002. She visited City University of Hong Kong in the Fall of 2014 and Kyoto University during November-December 2016. Among other awards and fellowships, she is the recipient of the Alexander Henderson Award for Excellence in Economic Theory from Carnegie-Mellon University in 1984, an NBER Visiting Fellowship in 1986, the university-wide Outstanding Faculty Member Award from Koç University in 2016, and the Science Award in Social Sciences by the Technological and Research Council of Turkey (TUBITAK) in 2017. She was a member of the Politics, Economics and Geography (PEG) college at the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) in the UK during 2000-2002. She is currently a member of the Board of Trustees of the Economic Research Forum (ERF) in Egypt and advisory boards for centers at the University of St. Andrew's and the University of Durham in the UK.
Dr. Altug is currently active in academic, policy, consulting and media circles and participates in conferences internationally as well as locally. She served as the Director of the KU-TUSIAD Economic Research Forum in Istanbul between 2010-2015 and she participated actively in G-20/T-20 activities during 2015 and 2016. She is also a member of the Central Governing Council of the Justice and Development Party in Turkey since 2021.