1. She has pushed the Fed to use aggressive new policies to boost the economy. Ms. Yellen, who focused much of her academic research on the costs and causes of unemployment, has consistently called for the Fed to respond forcefully to high joblessness. She argues that inflation isn’t likely to emerge with the economy in such a debilitated state – a point on which so far she has been right. “These are not just statistics to me. We know that long-term unemployment is devastating to workers and their families,” she said in a speech to the AFL-CIO labor union in February.

2. She has a record of being concerned about excessive inflation. Her public statements and past actions show she is committed to maintaining low inflation. The Fed “is determined to ensure that we never again repeat the experience of the late 1960s and 1970s, when the Federal Reserve didn’t respond forcefully enough to rising inflation,” she said in a 2011 speech.

She was a longstanding proponent of the Fed adopting a 2% inflation target, and was closely involved in the decision to do so in 2012. In 1996, while a Fed governor, Ms. Yellen debated then-Chairman Alan Greenspan over the right level of inflation, contending that too-low inflation could harm the economy just as too-high inflation could — a view that is now widely accepted at the Fed, but wasn’t then. Later that year, she urged Mr. Greenspan to raise short-term interest rates, fearing the booming economy threatened to unleash excessive inflation — advice he declined, according to former Fed governor Laurence Meyer.