Speakers

Laurence M. Ball

Laurence M. Ball is currently serving as the chair of the economics department at Johns Hopkins University, which he joined in 1994. He also is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and a visiting scholar at the International Monetary Fund. From 1989 to 1994 Ball was an assistant professor of economics at Princeton University; prior to that position, from 1985 to 1989 he served as an assistant professor of economics at New York University's Graduate School of Business. Previously, Ball has been a visiting scholar at the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, the Bank of England, the Bank of Japan, Norges Bank, the Reserve Bank of Australia, the Reserve Bank of New Zealand, the Hong Kong Monetary Authority, and the International Monetary Fund. He is the author of the undergraduate textbook, Money, Banking, and Financial Markets. Ball earned a B.A. in economics from Amherst College, and a Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Truman F. Bewley

Truman F. Bewley has been the Alfred C. Cowles Professor of Economics at Yale University since 1983. He previously taught at Northwestern University and at Harvard University. Bewley's initial work concentrated on general equilibrium theory, then his research agenda shifted to focus on models linking general equilibrium theory with macroeconomics. Two outcomes from this line of work were a paper showing a difficulty with Milton Friedman's theory of the optimal quantity of money and what Thomas Sargent has termed the Bewley model, in which a continuum of consumers whose individual behavior may fluctuate stochastically, though their aggregate behavior may not fluctuate at all. In the 1990s he conducted numerous interviews with business and labor leaders in an effort to understand why there is resistance to reducing wages during a business cycle downturn. These finding are detailed in his book, Why Wages Don't Fall During a Recession. Bewley has since conducted a large set of interviews with businesspeople about pricing behavior and plans to report these results in a future book. In January 2013 Bewley was elected a distinguished fellow of the American Economic Association. He received a B.A. in history from Cornell University and a Ph.D. in economics and a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of California at Berkeley.

Olivier Blanchard

Oliver Blanchard is the C. Fred Bergsten Senior Fellow at the Peterson Institute in Washington, DC. He is also the Robert M. Solow Professor of Economics Emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which he joined in 1982 after teaching at Harvard University from 1977 until 1982. A citizen of France, Blanchard is a macroeconomist who has worked on a wide set of issues spanning the role of monetary policy, the nature of speculative bubbles, the nature of the labor market and the determinants of unemployment, and economic transition in former communist countries. 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. Blanchard chaired the MIT economics department from 1998 to 2003, and from 2008 to 2015 he served as the chief economist for the International Monetary Fund while on leave from MIT. He has been nominated to be the next president of the American Economic Association. Blanchard has an M.S. in economics from the University of Paris-Nanterre, and a Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Gabriel Chodorow-Reich

Gabriel Chodorow-Reich is an assistant professor of economics at Harvard University, a post he assumed in 2014. His research focuses on macroeconomics, finance, and labor markets, and he is a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research. During the 2013–2014 academic year, Chodorow-Reich was the Julis-Rabinowitz Associate Research Scholar at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. Before completing his Ph.D. in 2013, he was an economist at the Council of Economic Advisers between 2009 and 2010. Chodorow-Reich was among the five recipients of the 2013 AQR Top Finance Graduate Award, administered in conjunction with the Copenhagen Business School. His coauthored paper, "Does State Fiscal Relief During Recessions Increase Employment? Evidence from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act," received the 2013 Economic Policy Best Paper Prize from the American Economic Journal. Chodorow-Reich has an A.B. in social studies from Harvard University and received his Ph.D. in economics from the University of California at Berkeley.

J. Bradford DeLong

J. Bradford DeLong has been a full professor of economics since 1997 at the University of California at Berkeley, which he joined in 1993 as an associate professor. DeLong's wide-ranging work extends from business cycle dynamics through economic growth, behavioral finance, political economy, economic history, international finance, and the history of economic thought. His book, Concrete Economics: The Hamilton Approach to Economic Growth and Policy (co-written with Stephen S. Cohen), was published in March 2016. DeLong is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, a fellow of the Institute for New Economic Thinking, and a web blogger at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth. He served in the U.S. government as Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy from 1993 to 1995. DeLong worked on the Clinton Administration's 1993 budget, on the Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs, on the North American Free Trade Agreement, on macroeconomic policy, and on the unsuccessful health care reform effort. Before joining the Treasury Department, DeLong was Danziger Associate Professor in the department of economics at Harvard University. He earned an A.B. in social studies from Harvard College and a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University.

Peter Diamond

Peter Diamond is an Institute Professor and professor of economics, emeritus, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he taught from 1966 to 2011. Diamond has written on public finance, social insurance, uncertainty and search theories, behavioral economics, and macroeconomics. His books include Saving Social Security: A Balanced Approach (with Peter R. Orszag), Reforming Pensions: Principles and Policy Choices and Pension Reform: A Short Guide (both with Nicholas Barr), and Behavioral Economics and Its Applications (edited with Hannu Vartiainen). His recent papers include "The Case for a Progressive Tax: From Basic Research to Policy Recommendations" (with Emmanuel Saez), "Cyclical Unemployment, Structural Unemployment," and "Shifts in the Beveridge Curve (with Ayşegül Şahin). Among his many honors, highlights include being a fellow of the Econometric Society and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; receiving the 2003 Paul A. Samuelson Award for Outstanding Scholarly Writing on Lifelong Financial Security from TIAA-CREF for his book, Taxation, Incomplete Markets, and Social Security; and receiving, along with Dale T. Mortensen and Christopher A. Pissarides, the 2010 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. Diamond earned a B.A. in mathematics from Yale University and a Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Karen Dynan

Karen Dynan has been serving as the U.S. Department of the Treasury's Assistant Secretary for Economic Policy and Chief Economist since mid-2014. She leads the Office of Economic Policy, which is responsible for analyzing economic developments and helping develop policies to address economic challenges. An expert on macroeconomic policy and household financial issues, Dynan has published widely in leading economics journals. Before joining Treasury, Dynan was vice president and co-director of the Economic Studies program at the Brookings Institution. She previously served on the staff of the Federal Reserve Board for 17 years. Dynan has also served as a senior economist at the White House Council of Economic Advisers and as a visiting assistant professor at Johns Hopkins University. Dynan received her A.B. in applied mathematics and economics from Brown University and her Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University.

John G. Fernald

John G. Fernald is a senior research adviser in the economic research department of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. Prior to his current position, Fernald was vice president and team leader for the San Francisco Fed's macroeconomics research group. His research interests include measuring productivity and technology, understanding the cyclical effects of technology shocks, and estimating the effects of Chinese monetary policy. Among other places, he has published articles in the Journal of Political Economy, the American Economic Review, the Journal of Monetary Economics, and the NBER Macroeconomics Annual. Fernald previously served at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago and at the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. In the late 1990s, he spent a year as senior economist for international economics on the staff of the President's Council of Economic Advisers. Fernald has taught at the University of Michigan, the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business, and INSEAD Business School. Fernald received A.B. and Ph.D. degrees in economics from Harvard University and an M.Sc. degree in economics from the London School of Economics.

Christopher L. Foote

Christopher L. Foote is a senior economist and policy advisor in the research department at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, which he joined in October 2003. His research and policy interests include the macroeconomics of the labor market and housing. Foote also teaches intermediate macroeconomics at Harvard University, where he was named Professor of the Practice of Economics in 2012. From 1996 to 2002 Foote was an assistant and then an associate economics professor in Harvard's department of economics, where he served as the director of undergraduate studies from 1998 to 2001. In July 2002 Foote accepted a position as senior staff economist with the Council of Economic Advisers, and became the CEA's chief economist in February 2003. From May to September 2003 Foote served as an economic advisor to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad, returning briefly to Iraq in January and February 2004. Foote has a B.A. from the College of William and Mary and earned his Ph.D. in macroeconomics and political economy at the University of Michigan.

Jeffrey C. Fuhrer

Jeffrey (Jeff) C. Fuhrer is an executive vice president at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, where he also serves as a senior monetary policy advisor and as a special advisor to the Bank's regional and community outreach functions. Fuhrer has published numerous scholarly papers on the interactions between monetary policy, inflation, consumer spending, and asset prices, and regularly participates in meetings of the Federal Open Market Committee. He joined the Bank's research department in June 1992 as an assistant vice president and economist, and from 1995–2001 headed its open economy macro/international section. In 2000 Fuhrer was named senior vice president and monetary policy advisor, and in 2006 he was named executive vice president. He directed the Bank's research department from 2001 through 2010. Fuhrer began his career at the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, first as a research assistant, and then in 1985 returned as a senior economist after earning his doctorate. He earned an A.B. in economics with highest honors from Princeton University and an M.A. and a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University.

Robert E. Hall

Robert E. Hall is the Robert and Carole McNeil Joint Senior Fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution and Professor of Economics at Stanford. His research focuses on the overall performance of the U.S. economy, including unemployment, capital formation, financial activity, and inflation. Hall has served as President, Vice President, and Ely Lecturer of the American Economic Association and is a Distinguished Fellow of the Association. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Society of Labor Economists, and the Econometric Society. Hall chairs the Business Cycle Chronology Committee of the National Bureau of Economic Research, where he is a Research Associate. He was a member of the National Presidential Advisory Committee on Productivity. Before joining Stanford in 1978, Hall taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of California at Berkeley. He earned a B.A. in economics from the University of California at Berkeley and a Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Peter Ireland

Peter Ireland is the Murray and Monti Professor of Economics at Boston College, a chaired position conferred in 2006. His teaching and research focus on macroeconomics and monetary policy, particularly Federal Reserve policy and its effects on the U.S. economy. Ireland is a research associate in the monetary economics program at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and a member of the Shadow Open Market Committee. Before joining Boston College in 1998 as an associate professor, Ireland was an assistant professor at Rutgers University from 1996 to 1998. He worked as an economist in the research department of Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond from 1991 to 1994, then as an associate research officer from 1994 to 1996. In 1999 Ireland was a visiting scholar at the Division of Monetary Affairs at the Federal Reserve Board and has served as a consultant for the Bank of Canada and the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland. Ireland earned his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. degrees, all in economics, from the University of Chicago.

Robert G. King

Robert G. King is a full professor of economics at Boston University, which he joined in 2000. His broad interests lie in financial economics, monetary economics, and macroeconomics, which over the course of his career he has taught to undergraduates and graduate students. King's current research interests include the link between price dynamics and real economic activity; the design of monetary policy rules; and the performance of securitization structures. He is a consultant to the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, a fellow of the Econometric Society, and edits the Journal of Monetary Economics. Before his current academic appointment, King was a professor at the University of Rochester (1978–1993) and at the University of Virginia (1993–2000). He was the first economist to receive a National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator Award. King earned a B.A. in economics and mathematics and a Ph.D. in economics from Brown University.

Alan B. Krueger

Alan B. Krueger is the Bendheim Professor of Economics and Public Affairs at Princeton University and the founding director of the Princeton University Survey Research Center. Since he joined Princeton in 1987, he has held a joint appointment with the economics department and the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. Krueger has published widely on the economics of education, terrorism, unemployment, labor demand, income distribution, social insurance, labor market regulation, and environmental economics. From November 2011 to August 2013, Krueger served as chairman of President Obama's Council of Economic Advisers and as a member of the Cabinet. Krueger also served as the Assistant Secretary for Economic Policy and the Chief Economist of the U.S. Department of the Treasury in 2009–2010, and as Chief Economist at the U.S. Department of Labor in 1994–1995. Besides writing numerous journal articles and co-editing many books, he is the author of What Makes a Terrorist: Economics and the Roots of Terrorism (2007) and the coauthor (with David Card) of Myth and Measurement: The New Economics of the Minimum Wage (1995). Krueger is a research associate with the National Bureau of Economic Research, a research Fellow at IZA, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, and a fellow of the Econometric Society. He received a B.S. degree in industrial & labor relations from Cornell University, and an A.M. and a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University.

N. Gregory Mankiw

N. Gregory Mankiw is the Robert M. Beren Professor of Economics at Harvard University. His research includes work on price adjustment, consumer behavior, financial markets, monetary and fiscal policy, and economic growth. Mankiw has taught classes in statistics, macroeconomics, microeconomics, and introductory economics. From 2003 to 2005 Mankiw served as the Chairman of the President's Council of Economic Advisers. A prolific writer and a regular participant in academic and policy debates, his academic articles have appeared in journals such as the American Economic Review, the Journal of Political Economy, and the Quarterly Journal of Economics. Mankiw's work has also appeared in more widely accessible forums, such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal. He has written two popular college textbooks—an intermediate-level macroeconomics textbook and an introductory textbook, Principles of Economics, which has been translated into twenty languages. Mankiw has been a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, an adviser to the Congressional Budget Office, and an advisor to the Federal Reserve Banks of Boston and New York. He earned an A.B. in economics from Princeton University and a Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Atif R. Mian

Atif R. Mian is the Theodore A. Wells '29 Professor of Economics and Public Affairs at Princeton University, the director of the Julis-Rabinowitz Center for Public Policy and Finance at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, and a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Mian's work studies the connections between finance and the macroeconomy. His book, House of Debt: How They (and You) Caused the Great Recession, and How We Can Prevent It from Happening Again, written with Amir Sufi, builds upon powerful new data to describe how debt precipitated the Great Recession, why debt continues to threaten the global economy, and what needs to be done to fix the financial system. Prior to joining Princeton in 2012, he was at the University of California at Berkeley from 2009 to 2013 and at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business from 2001 to 2009. Mian was a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco from 2011 to 2012 and a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York from 2012 to 2013. He has an S.B. in mathematics with computer science and a Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Ricardo P. C. Nunes

Ricardo P. C. Nunes is a senior economist and policy advisor in in the research department at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. His main research interests focus on macroeconomics, both theoretical and applied. Among other topics, Nunes has published research examining the design of monetary policy, expectations formation, inflation dynamics, central banking communication and forward guidance, policy credibility, sovereign bond default, maturity structure, and the interactions between monetary and fiscal policy. Prior to joining the Boston Fed in 2014, Nunes was a senior economist at the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. He has also been a visiting scholar at the International Monetary Fund and the Bank of Portugal. Nunes holds a B.Sc. in economics from the Universidade Tecnica de Lisboa, and earned his M.Sc. and Ph.D. in economics from the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona).

Joe Peek

Joe Peek is a vice president and economist in the research department of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, where he heads the finance section. His current research interests are in financial stability, macroprudential regulation, international banking, Japanese banking problems, and monetary policy. Peek is also a research associate at Columbia University's Center on the Japanese Economy and Business, and in 2004–2005 was a fellow at the FDIC's Center for Financial Research. Before joining the Boston Fed in 2011, Peek held the Gatton Chair in International Banking and Financial Economics at the University of Kentucky's Gatton College of Business and Economics from 2000 through 2011. Peek began his academic career at Boston College's department of economics, progressing from an instructor in 1978 to full professorship by 1989, and served as director of graduate studies from 1987 to 1990. Peeks's earlier affiliation with the Boston Fed was as a visiting scholar from 1985 through 2000. In the Spring of 1992 and Spring of 1994, Peek served in a visiting capacity at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand. He earned a B.S. in mathematics and an M.S. in economics from Oklahoma State University, and a Ph.D. in economics from Northwestern University.

Luigi Pistaferri

Luigi Pistaferri is a full professor of economics at Stanford University, where he began his academic career as an assistant professor in 1999, and since 2013 has been the Ralph Landau Senior Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. Pistaferri's academic work explores the intersection between labor economics and macroeconomics. He is also a research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research, the Centre for Economic and Policy Research, and the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA). Pistaferri is one of the eight principal coeditors of the American Economic Review. Before joining the faculty at Stanford, he served as a research economist at the Institute for Fiscal Studies, located in London. Pistaferri has an A.B in international trade and foreign exchange markets from the Instituto Universitario Navale (IUN) in Naples, Italy, a master's degree in economics from Bocconi University in Milan, a Ph.D. in economics from University College London in 1999, and earned a doctorate in economic sciences from IUN in 2001.

Lucrezia Reichlin

Lucrezia Reichlin is a full professor of economics at the London Business School, which she joined in late 2008, and is chair and co-founder of Now-Casting Economics, Ltd. An expert on forecasting, business cycle analysis, and monetary policy, Reichlin pioneered "nowcasting" by developing econometric methods capable of reading the real-time data flow through the lenses of a formal econometric model—methods that are now widely used by central banks and private investors around the world. Between March 2005 and September 2008 she served as Director General of Research at the European Central Bank. She chairs the Scientific Council at Bruegel, the Brussels based think-tank; is a member of the Commission Economique de la Nation (advisory board to the French finance and economics ministers); and is a nonexecutive director of UniCredit Banking Group and AGEAS Insurance Group. Reichlin has held a number of previous academic positions, including professor of economics at the Université Libre de Bruxelles. She is a fellow of the British Academy, a fellow of the European Economic Association, and member of the council of the Royal Economic Society, and is a columnist for the Italian national daily Il Corriere della Sera. Reichlin has a laurea in economics from the University of Modena and received a Ph.D. in economics from New York University.

Eric S. Rosengren

Eric S. Rosengren is the President and Chief Executive Officer of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, a post he assumed in July 2007. His economic research has focused on the link between financial problems and the real economy, and he has published extensively on macroeconomics, international banking, bank supervision, and risk management. Prior to his current position, Rosengren was a senior manager in the Bank's research department and in the division of bank supervision, regulation, and credit. He joined the Bank in 1985 as an economist in the research department, was promoted to assistant vice president in 1989 and to vice president in 1991, when he also became head of the department's banking and monetary policy section. In 2000 Rosengren was named senior vice president and head of the department of supervision, regulation, and credit, in 2003 was given the additional title of chief discount officer, and in 2005 became an executive vice president. While in the bank supervision function, Rosengren was active in domestic and international regulatory policy. He serves as a director for United Way of Massachusetts Bay and Merrimack Valley, as a trustee for Colby College, and as a member of the advisory boards at Colby College and the University of Wisconsin. Rosengren earned a B.A. in economics from Colby College, and an M.S. and Ph.D. in economics from the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

James H. Stock

James H. Stock has been a professor of economics at Harvard University since 2002, and served as department chair from 2007 to 2009. In 2007 he was named the Harold Hitchings Burbank Professor of Political Economy. As a researcher, Stock concentrates on empirical macroeconomics, monetary policy, econometric methods, and energy and environmental policy. He co-edits the Brookings Papers on Economic Activity and, along with Mark Watson, has written a leading introductory econometrics textbook. Stock began his teaching career at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government, where he taught from 1983 to 1990, then served as a professor of economics at the University of California at Berkeley during the 1990–1991 academic year before returning to the Kennedy School in 1991. In 1998 he became the Roy E. Larsen Professor of Political Economy, a position he held until 2002, when he joined Harvard's department of economics. From 2012 through 2014, Stock was a member of the Council of Economic Advisers to President Obama. He has a B.S. in physics from Yale University and a M.S. in statistics and a Ph.D. in economics from the University of California at Berkeley.

Janet L. Yellen

Janet L. Yellen began a four-year term as Chair of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System on February 3, 2014, and she also serves as Chair of the Federal Open Market Committee, the System's principal monetary policymaking body. Prior to her current appointment, Dr. Yellen took office as Vice Chair of the Board of Governors in October 2010, when she simultaneously began a 14-year term as a member of the Board that will expire January 31, 2024. From 2004 to 2010, she served as the President and Chief Executive Officer of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. Dr. Yellen has written on a wide variety of macroeconomic issues, with a particular emphasis on the causes, mechanisms, and implications of unemployment. Now an emeritus professor at the University of California at Berkeley, where she spent most of her academic career, she was the Eugene E. and Catherine M. Trefethen Professor of Business and Professor of Economics before joining the San Francisco Fed. While on leave from Berkeley for five years starting August 1994, she served as a member of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System through February 1997, and then left to become chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, a position she held through August 1999. Dr. Yellen also chaired the Economic Policy Committee of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development from 1997 to 1999. She began her academic career as an assistant professor at Harvard University, then was an economist at the Board of Governors in 1977 and 1978, and served on the faculty of the London School of Economics from 1978 to 1980. Dr. Yellen is a member of both the Council on Foreign Relations and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She graduated summa cum laude from Brown University with a degree in economics and received her Ph.D. in Economics from Yale University.