Peter Howitt received a BA (Honours Economics and Political Science) from McGill University in 1968, MA from the University of Western Ontario in 1969, and PhD from Northwestern University in 1973. He taught Economics at the University of Western Ontario from 1972 until 1996, where he was Bank of Montreal Professor of Money and Finance from 1990 to 1995. From 1996 until 2000, he was University Chaired Professor of Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics at the Ohio State University. From 2000 until 2013 he was Professor of Economics at Brown University, where he is now Professor of Economics Emeritus.

He has written extensively on the foundations of macroeconomics, monetary theory, and Canadian monetary policy. Together with Philippe Aghion he is the creator of the Schumpeterian theory of growth through creative destruction. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and a Fellow of the Econometric Society. In 1993-94 he was President of the Canadian Economics Association. In 2019 he and Aghion were together awarded the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Economics, Finance and Management, and in 2025 they were awarded the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences.