Speaker Biographies
David Autor is a professor and associate head of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) department of economics and faculty research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. His research analyzes the labor market impacts of technological change and globalization, earnings inequality, and disability insurance and labor supply. Autor is an elected fellow of the Econometrics Society, the Society of Labor Economists, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He received an NSF Career award, an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship, the Sherwin Rosen Prize for outstanding contributions in the field of Labor Economics, and MIT's James A. and Ruth Levitan Award for excellence in teaching. Autor earned a bachelor of arts in psychology from Tufts University and a doctorate in public policy from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. Prior to graduate study, he spent three years directing computer skills education for economically disadvantaged children and adults in San Francisco and South Africa. Autor is the cocaptain of the MIT economics hockey team, which is reputed to be one of the most highly cited teams in the MIT intramural league.
Steve Davis studies employment, worker mobility, job loss, labor market institutions, business dynamics, economic fluctuations, public policy, and other topics. His research appears in the American Economic Review, Journal of Political Economy, Quarterly Journal of Economics, and other leading journals. Davis is a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution, former editor of the American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, and a fellow of the Society of Labor Economists. He is also a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, senior academic fellow with the Asian Bureau of Finance and Economics Research, adviser to the U.S. Congressional Budget Office, and visiting scholar and consultant, respectively, with the Federal Reserve Banks of Atlanta and Chicago. In 2013, Davis received the Addington Prize in Measurement, awarded by the Fraser Institute for Public Policy, for his research on "Measuring Economic Policy Uncertainty." He co-organizes the Asian Monetary Policy Forum, held annually in Singapore. His teaching experience includes doctoral courses in macroeconomics and labor economics at the University of Chicago, MIT, and the University of Maryland; MBA courses in macroeconomics, money and banking, business strategy, and financial institutions for Chicago Booth; and executive MBA courses in macroeconomics for Chicago Booth in Barcelona, London, and Singapore.
Christopher L. Foote is a senior economist and policy adviser in the research department at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. His research and policy interests include the macroeconomics of the labor market and housing. He graduated from the College of William and Mary, and then worked for two years as a newspaper reporter in Harrisonburg, Virginia. He received his doctorate in economics from the University of Michigan in 1996. From 1996 to 2002, Foote taught at Harvard University's department of economics. In July 2002, he accepted a position as senior staff economist with the Council of Economic Advisers, becoming chief economist in February 2003. From May 2003 to September 2003, he served as an economic adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad, Iraq, returning briefly to Iraq in January and February of 2004. He joined the Boston Fed in October 2003. In his spare time, Foote teaches intermediate macroeconomics at Harvard, where he was named a professor of the practice of economics in 2012.
David Green is a professor in the Vancouver School of Economics at the University of British Columbia and an international fellow at the Institute for Fiscal Studies in London. His research interests center on determinants of the wage and employment structure. In his recent work, this has entailed bridging between macro labor (worrying about general equilibrium effects) and micro labor identification issues.
Fatih Guvenen is a professor of economics in the department of economics at the University of Minnesota. She will spend the 2015–16 academic year as the Kumho Visiting Professor in the department of economics at Yale University. Guvensen is also a research consultant for the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research in the Economic Fluctuations and Growth program.
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 fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Society of Labor Economists, and the Econometric Society. Hall chairs the Business Cycle Dating Committee of the National Bureau of Economic Research. He was a member of the National Presidential Advisory Committee on Productivity. For further information about his professional activities, visit his Stanford web page, Stanford.edu/~rehall
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John Haltiwanger is a distinguished university professor in the department of economics at the University of Maryland. He is also the first recipient of the Dudley and Louisa Dillard Professorship in 2013. Haltiwanger received his doctorate from Johns Hopkins University in 1981. After serving on the faculty of University of California, Los Angeles and Johns Hopkins, he joined the faculty at Maryland in 1987. In the late 1990s, he served as chief economist of the U.S. Census Bureau. Haltiwanger is a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, a senior research fellow at the Center for Economic Studies at the U.S. Census Bureau, and a fellow of the Society of Labor Economics. He has played a major role in developing and studying U.S. longitudinal firm-level data. Using these data, he has developed new statistical measures and analyzed the determinants of firm-level job creation, job destruction, and economic performance. He has explored the implications of these firm dynamics for aggregate U.S. productivity growth and for the U.S. labor market. The statistical and measurement methods he has helped develop to measure and study firm dynamics have been increasingly used by many statistical agencies around the world. His own research increasingly uses the data and measures on firm dynamics from a substantial number of advanced, emerging, and transition economies. His work with the statistical agencies has been recently recognized with the Julius Shiskin Award for economic statistics in 2013 and the Roger Herriott Award for innovation in federal statistics in 2014. He has published more than 100 academic articles and numerous books, including Job Creation and Destruction (with Steven Davis and Scott Schuh).
Patrick Kline joined the University of California, Berkeley department of economics in 2008 as an assistant professor after having been on the faculty at Yale University for a year. Kline received his doctorate from the University of Michigan in 2007. He holds a master's in public policy from the Ford School of Public Policy and a bachelor degree in political science from Reed College. He is the 2007 winner of the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research dissertation prize and was chosen as a participant in the 2007 Review of Economic Studies European Tour and the 2008 Frontiers of Econometrics conference in Japan.
Lance Lochner is currently professor of economics at the University of Western Ontario, CIBC chair in human capital and productivity, and Canada research chair in human capital and productivity. He is also director of the CIBC Centre for Human Capital at the University of Western Ontario and serves as cocoordinator of the Markets Network, an international research network devoted to studying issues central to financing human capital investment. Lochner is also an editor at the Journal of Labor Economics and associate editor at the Journal of Applied Econometrics. He received his doctorate in economics from the University of Chicago in 1998. Lochner's research is largely devoted to the study of human capital formation throughout the lifecycle and to understanding criminal behavior. Previous and current research explores the interaction between human capital and criminal behavior, financial returns to schooling, human capital acquisition from birth to retirement, the evolution of earnings inequality, and issues related to financing education.
Dennis Lockhart has been president and chief executive officer of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta since March 2007. In this role, Lockhart is responsible for all the Bank's activities, including monetary policy, bank supervision and regulation, and payment services. In addition, he serves on the Federal Reserve's chief monetary policy body, the Federal Open Market Committee. From 2003 to 2007, Lockhart served on the faculty of Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service. He also was an adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies. From 2002 to 2007, he served as chairman of the Small Enterprise Assistance Funds, a sponsor and operator of emerging markets venture capital and private equity funds. From 2001 to 2003, Lockhart was managing partner at the private equity firm Zephyr Management LP, based in New York. Prior to joining Zephyr, Lockhart worked for 13 years at Heller Financial, where he served as president of Heller International Group. In 2000, he served as chairman of the advisory committee of the U.S. Export-Import Bank. From 1971 to 1988, Lockhart held various positions, both international and domestic, with Citicorp/Citibank (now Citigroup). He earned a bachelor of arts in political science and economics from Stanford University in 1968 and a master's in international economics and American foreign policy from the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies in 1971. He also attended the Senior Executive Program at MIT's Sloan School of Management, in 1994. In 2012, he was awarded an honorary doctoral degree by Georgia State University. He served as an officer in the U.S. Marine Corps Reserve from 1968 to 1974.
Giuseppe Moscarini is a professor of economics at Yale University, where he has been on the faculty since completing his doctorate in economics at MIT in 1996. A native of Italy, he received his undergraduate degree from the Università degli Studi di Roma "La Sapienza." He is also a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, in the Economics Fluctuations and Growth program, where he cochairs the group on micro and macro perspectives on the aggregate labor market. He is codirector of the Macroeconomics Research Program at the Cowles Foundation for Research in Economics and a coeditor of Theoretical Economics. He visited New York University in 1999–2000, and is a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia. Moscarini's major field of study is macroeconomics, with particular interests in labor markets-unemployment, turnover, wage inequality and dynamics, and price stickiness. He also has done extensive work and publications in the economics of information. His research has been supported by, among others, a research fellowship from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the National Science Foundation.
Fabrizio Perri is currently monetary adviser at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. Past positions include professor of economics at the University of Minnesota and at Università Bocconi, and William Berkley Professor in Economics and Business at New York University. He graduated from Universitá Bocconi in Italy with a degree in economics and social sciences, and received his doctorate in economics from the University of Pennsylvania. Perri is an affiliate of the National Bureau of Economic Research and the Centre for Economic Policy Research. He has been a member of the Economic Policy Panel and an associate editor for the Journal of Economic Theory, the Journal of the European Economic Association, Quantitative Economics, the Review of Economic Dynamics, and the Journal of International Economics. Currently he is an associate editor at the American Economic Review and coeditor at the Journal of International Economics. Perri has been the recipient of research grants from the Sloan Foundation, the National Science Foundation, and from the European Research Council. He does research in macroeconomics, international macroeconomics, and inequality, and he is interested in understanding sources of risk and possibilities for risk sharing among individuals and countries. On these topics he has published his work in journals such as Econometrica, the Journal of Economic Theory, the Journal of Monetary Economics, the Journal of Political Economy, and the Review of Economic Studies. Visit his website at fperri.net.
M. Melinda Pitts is the director of the Center for Human Capital Studies in the research department of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. Her major fields of study are health and labor economics. She also contributes to the Atlanta Fed's macroblog, which provides commentary on economic topics, including monetary policy, macroeconomic developments, and the Southeast economy. Prior to joining the Bank in 2002, Pitts was an assistant professor of economics at Georgia State University, in Atlanta. She also worked as an assistant professor of economics at Salisbury State University in Salisbury, Maryland. She has published in several journals, including Industrial Relations, the American Economic Review, Archives of Internal Medicine, and Research in Labor Economics. She is a member of the American Economic Association, International Health Economics Association, American Society of Health Economists, and the Society of Labor Economics. Pitts received her doctorate in economics in 1997 and her master's degree in economics in 1993, both from North Carolina State University. She received her bachelor of arts in economics in 1987 from Clemson University.
John Robertson is a research economist and senior policy adviser at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. His research has been widely published, covering a variety of macroeconomic and microeconomic topics, and he is one of the Bank's senior monetary policy advisers. He also contributes to the Atlanta Fed's macroblog, which provides commentary on economic issues, including monetary policy, macroeconomic developments, and the Southeast economy, and he gives public talks on a range of economic subjects. Robertson joined the Atlanta Fed's research department in December 1997 from the Australian National University in Canberra, Australia. A native of Dunedin, New Zealand, Robertson holds bachelor's and master's degrees from the University of Canterbury in New Zealand and earned his doctorate in economics from Virginia Tech in 1992.
Richard Rogerson joined the faculty of Princeton University in the spring of 2011, where he is the Charles and Marie Robertson Professor of Economics and Public Affairs. He obtained his doctorate in economics from the University of Minnesota in 1984 and has previously held faculty positions at the University of Rochester, New York University, Stanford University, the University of Minnesota, the University of Pennsylvania, and Arizona State University. His teaching and research interests are in the fields of macroeconomics and labor economics. His published work includes papers on labor supply and taxes, business cycle fluctuations, the effects of labor market regulations, financing of public education, and development. He currently serves as editor of the American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics and associate editor of the Review of Economic Dynamics. He previously served as coeditor of the American Economic Review and associate editor of the Journal of Monetary Economics, the Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, and the International Economic Review. He is the director of the Louis A. Simpson Center for the Study of Macroeconomics, a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and a fellow of the Econometric Society.
Jesse Rothstein is a professor of public policy and economics at the University of California, Berkeley, with affiliations in the department of economics and the Goldman School of Public Policy. He is also the director of the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment. He previously served as chief economist at the U.S. Department of Labor and as senior economist with the Council of Economic Advisers, both in the Obama administration. Rothstein's research focuses on education policy and on the labor market. His recent work includes studies of teacher quality and of the effects of unemployment insurance during the Great Recession. His work has been published in leading journals in economics, public policy, education, and law. Rothstein received a doctorate in economics and a master's in public policy, both from the University of California, Berkeley, and his undergraduate degree from Harvard. He is a member of the editorial boards of the American Economic Review, Industrial Relations, and the National Education Policy Center. Rothstein was named the John T. Dunlop Outstanding Scholar by the Labor and Employment Relations Association in 2011. He is a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research and a fellow of the National Education Policy Center, the CESifo Research Network, and the Institute for the Study of Labor.
Ayşegűl Şahin joined the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in June 2004 as an economist in the macroeconomic and monetary studies function. Since she joined the New York Fed, she has worked extensively on the analysis of the U.S. labor market. Her recent research focuses on labor market mismatch and its impact on the labor market, wage dynamics over the business cycle, and the decline in business formation. Şahin received her doctorate from the University of Rochester in May 2002. Prior to joining the New York Fed, she was an assistant professor at Purdue University's Krannert Graduate School of Management.
Robert Shimer is the Alvin H. Baum Professor in Economics at the University of Chicago. Prior to joining the Chicago faculty in 2003, he received his doctorate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and taught at Princeton University. He is a consultant at the Federal Reserve Banks of Atlanta and Chicago, a research associate in the National Bureau of Economic Research, a fellow of the Econometric Society, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was the cochair of the NBER Economic Fluctuations and Growth "macro perspectives" group and has served as editor of the Journal of Political Economy. Shimer's research lies in the intersection between macroeconomics and labor economics. He has focused on search frictions, the mismatch between workers' human capital and geographic location and the skill requirements and location of available jobs, and duration dependence in the exit rate from unemployment. He is the author of Labor Markets and Business Cycles and has published in many leading journals, including the American Economic Review, Econometrica, the Journal of Political Economy, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the Review of Economic Studies, the Journal of Economic Literature, and the American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics.
Till von Wachter is an associate professor of economics at the University of California, Los Angeles and a member of the executive committee of the California Center for Population Research. He is also a faculty research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, the Center for Economic Policy Research, and RAND. His research examines how labor market conditions and institutions affect the well-being of workers and their families. This includes the analysis of unemployment and job loss on workers' long-term outcomes, as well as the role of unemployment insurance and disability insurance in buffering such shocks. This work has been published in top academic journals such as the Quarterly Journal of Economics and the American Economic Review. Professor von Wachter has been an expert witness in numerous testimonies before congressional committees, and has provided expert assistance to the U.S. Department of Labor, the Canadian Labor Ministry, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the United Nations, and the International Monetary Fund. In spring 2015, von Wachter assisted the city of Los Angeles in evaluating the impact of proposed minimum wage ordinances.