A citizen of France, Olivier Blanchard has spent most of his professional life in Cambridge, U.S. After obtaining his Ph.D in economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1977, he taught at Harvard University, returning to MIT in 1982, where he is now the Class of 1941 Professor of Economics. He was Chairman of Economics Department from 1998 to 2003. He is currently on leave at the International Monetary Fund in Washington, where he is the Economic Counsellor and the director of Research.

He is a macroeconomist, who has worked on a wide set of issues, from the role of monetary policy, to the nature of speculative bubbles, to the nature of the labor market and the determinants of unemployment, to transition in former communist countries, to macroeconomic slumps, and to external imbalances. In the process, he has worked with numerous countries and international organizations. He is the author of many books and articles, including two textbooks in macroeconomics, one at the graduate level with Stanley Fischer, one at the undergraduate level.

He is a fellow and past Council member of the Econometric Society, a past vice president of the American Economic Association, and a member of the American Academy of Sciences.