Posen was born in Brookline, Massachusetts. He received a PhD in Political Economy and Government from Harvard University, where he was a National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Fellow, after graduating from Harvard College in 1988.[citation needed]
His research focuses on macroeconomic policy in the industrial democracies, G-20 economic relations, the resolution of financial crises, and central banking issues. He has been a consultant to the IMF and to several US government agencies, as well as to the British and Japanese Cabinet Offices, and a visiting scholar at central banks in Europe and East Asia, and in the US Federal Reserve System. From 1994 to 1997, he was an economist in international research at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and from 1993 to 1994 was Okun Memorial Fellow in Economic Studies at the Brookings Institution. He was a Bosch Foundation Fellow in Germany in 1992 to 1993, where he worked for the Bundesbank in Frankfurt and for Deutsche Bank in Berlin. He has also been a Public Policy Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin (2001).[2] In 2006 he was a Houblon-Norman Senior Fellow at the Bank of England, on sabbatical from Peterson Institute for International Economics.