ADVISORY BOARD
Nobel Laureates
George Arthur Akerlof is an American economist and Koshland Professor of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley. He won the 2001 Nobel Prize in Economics (shared with Michael Spence and Joseph E. Stiglitz). Akerlof graduated from the Lawrenceville School and received his B.A. degree from Yale University in 1962, and his Ph.D. degree from MIT in 1966, and has taught at the London School of Economics. Akerlof is perhaps best known for his article, "The Market for Lemons: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism", published in Quarterly Journal of Economics in 1970, in which he identified certain severe problems that afflict markets characterized by asymmetrical information.
Sir James Alexander Mirrlees, FBA (5 July 1936) is a Scottish economist and winner of the 1996 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. He was knighted in 1998. Born in Minnigaff, Wigtownshire, Mirrlees was educated at the University of Edinburgh and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was a very active student debater. Between 1968 and 1976, James A. Mirrlees was a visiting professor at MIT three times. He taught at both Oxford University (1969-1995) and University of Cambridge (1963- and 1995-). During his time at Oxford, he published the economic models and equations for which he would eventually be awarded his Nobel Prize. They centered on situations in which economic information is asymmetrical or incomplete, determining the extent to which they should affect the optimal rate of saving in an economy. Among other results, they demonstrated the principles of "moral hazard" and "optimal income taxation" discussed in the books of William Vickrey. The methodology has since become the standard in the field. Vickrey and Mirrlees shared the 1996 Nobel Prize for Economics "for their fundamental contributions to the economic theory of incentives under asymmetric information".
Andrew Michael Spence (born November 7, 1943) is an American-born, Canadian- raised economist and recipient of the 2001 Nobel Prize in Economics, along with George A. Akerlof and Joseph E. Stiglitz, for their work on the dynamics of information flows and market development. He conducted this research while at Harvard University. In the current technological environment—with ever more abundant information flows about market development, prices, profit margins, investment instruments and rates of return—their work is more relevant than ever.
Michael Spence is probably most famous for his job-market signaling model, which essentially triggered the enormous volume of literature in this branch of contract theory. In this model, employees signal their respective skills to employers by acquiring a certain degree of education, which is costly to them. Employers will pay higher wages to more educated employees, because they know that the proportion of employees with high abilities is higher among the educated ones, as it is less costly for them to acquire education than it is for employees with low abilities. For the model to work, it is not even necessary for education to have any intrinsic value if it can convey information about the sender (employee) to the recipient (employer) and if the signal is costly.
Joseph E. Stiglitz (born February 9, 1943) is an American economist and a professor at Columbia University. He is a recipient of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences (2001) and the John Bates Clark Medal (1979). He is also the former Senior Vice President and Chief Economist of the World Bank. He is known for his critical view of the management of globalization, free-market economists (whom he calls "free market fundamentalists") and some international institutions like the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. In 2000, Stiglitz founded the Initiative for Policy Dialogue (IPD), a think tank on international development based at Columbia University. Since 2001, he has been a member of the Columbia faculty, and has held the rank of University Professor since 2003. He also chairs the University of Manchester's Brooks World Poverty Institute and is a member of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences. Stiglitz is one of the most frequently cited economists in the world.
Willem Hendrik Buiter was a member of the Bank of England's Monetary Policy Committee from June 1997-May 2000. He joined the London School of Economics as a chair in the European Institute in September 2005. In November of 2009, Buiter joined Citigroup as Chief Economist, replacing Lewis Alexander who vacated the position to work with the United States Treasury eight months prior.
Markus K. Brunnermeier is a financial economist specializing in financial crises and panics. His work focuses on the role financial frictions (e.g. transaction costs) play in the formation and collapse of economic bubbles. Brunnermeier is an associate editor of The American Economic Review as well as the Journal of Finance and a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Prior to completing his PhD in economics at the London School of Economics he attended various universities in Germany and the United States. Upon graduating in 1999, Brunnermeier accepted an assistant professorship at Princeton University. He currently serves at Edwards S. Sanford Professor of Economics at Princeton University's Bendheim Center for Finance, a position he has held since 2008. He is the eighth winner of the Germán Bernácer Prize, awarded to European economists under 40 who contribute significantly to the fields of finance and macroeconomics.
Robert Dugger is a Managing Director of Tudor Investment Corporation, an asset management company active in currency, bond, equity and commodity markets worldwide. He was previously Director for Policy and Chief Economist at the American Bankers Association where he led a panel of nationally recognized bank officers in developing a plan to deal with the US savings and loan crisis. The report of the panel proposed establishing the Resolution Trust Corporation and served as the starting point of the efforts in 1989 to solve the S&L problem.
Thomas Ferguson (born 1949) is an American political scientist and author who studies and writes on politics and economics, often within a historical perspective. He is a political science professor at the University of Massachusetts Boston. He obtained his Ph.D. from Princeton University. He is also a contributing editor for The Nation. He is known for his investment theory of party competition.
Roman Frydman is Professor of Economics at New York University since 1995. He was one of the critics of the Rational Expectation Hypothesis. His path-breaking book, « Imperfect Knowledge Economics » was published by Princeton University in 2007.
Ian Goldin was born in South Africa on 3 March 1955.He took up his most recent position as Director of the James Martin 21st Century School, based at the University of Oxford, in September 2006. He also holds a Professorial Fellowship at Balliol College, Oxford.
Charles Albert Eric Goodhart, CBE, FBA is an economist. He was a member of the Bank of England's Monetary Policy Committee from June 1997-May 2000. He is the developer of Goodhart's law, an economic law named after him. .
David F. Hendry, Kt, is Professor of Economics and Fellow of Nuffield College, University of Oxford: previously Professor of Econometrics, London School of Economics. He was Knighted in 2009; is an Honorary Vice-President and past President Royal Economic Society; Fellow, British Academy, Royal Society of Edinburgh, and Econometric Society; Foreign HonoraryMember, American Economic Association and American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has seven Honorary Doctorates, and the Guy Medal in Bronze by the Royal Statistical Society. He is listed by the ISI as one of the world’s 200 most cited economists, and has published more than 180 papers, and 14 books on econometric methods, theory, modelling, and history; numerical techniques; computing; empirical economics; and forecasting.
Prof. Johnson is the Ronald A. Kurtz (1954) Professor of Entrepreneurship at MIT Sloan School of Management. He is also a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, D.C., a co-founder of BaselineScenario.com (a widely cited website on the global economy), and a member of the Congressional Budget Office's Panel of Economic Advisers. Prof. Johnson is a weekly contributor to NYT.com's Economix, has a monthly column with Project Syndicate that runs in publications around the world, and has published high impact opinion pieces recently in The Atlantic, The New Republic, BusinessWeek, Bloomberg, and The Financial Times, among other places. In January 2010, he joined The Huffington Post as contributing business editor. His book on the next meltdown of the US financial system, 13 Bankers, will be published in March.
Anatole Kaletsky writes for The Times Comment pages on Thursdays. One of the country's leading commentators on economics, he was formerly Economics Editor and is now Editor-at-large of The Times. He has won many awards for his financial and political journalism. Before joining The Times, he worked for 12 years on the Financial Times
John Kay (born 1948, Edinburgh) is a leading British business economist of centrist persuasion. Kay (2003), addressed to non-economists, attempts to answer what Robert Lucas has called the most exciting economic question: across the globe, why are so few rich and so many poor?
Axel Leijonhufvud born in Stockholm, he obtained his Ph.D. from Northwestern in 1967. Partly under the influence of Robert Clower, Leijonhufvud produced a dissertation which was to profoundly affect macroeconomics for the next decade: On Keynesian Economics and the Economics of Keynes (1968). Perhaps the first serious scholarly study of Keynes's work, Leijonhufvud's book differentiated between "Keynesian Economics" (Hicks-Samuelson type of synthesis) and "Economics of Keynes" (the work of J.M. Keynes) and essentially demonstrated that the two had little in common. He joined Clower in calling for a dynamic, "microfounded" formulation of Keynesian theory which explained underemployment equilibrium rather than merely referring to it as an imperfection. In particular, Leijonhufvud relies on differing speeds of quantity and price adjustments to create the coordination failures which yield protracted unemployment. His later work in the 1970s and 1980s still mirrored this quest. In the 1990s, Clower and Leijonhufvud identified the fast-growing evolutionary theory and computational economics as moving in the right direction and founded a fledgling school, "Post Walrasian", intent on harnessing macroeconomics to it.
Perry G. Mehrling, Professor of Economics, joined the faculty of Barnard in 1987. He has also held visiting positions at the Sloan School of Management at MIT, and at Boston University. At Barnard, Professor Mehrling teaches courses on the economics of money and banking, the history of finance, and the financial dimensions of the U.S. retirement, health, and education systems. Professor Mehrling's research focuses on the foundations of monetary economics and the history and applications of monetary economics and finance. He aims to develop a theory of money that takes as its starting point the inside credit character of modern money, in order to integrate monetary economics with modern finance, and so contribute to an alternative money theoretical basis for macroeconomics. Professor Mehrling is currently a member of the Board of Directors of the Eastern Economics Association, and a member of the Economists Forum at the Financial Times.
Dr. Yaga Venugopal Reddy, better known as Y.V. Reddy is an Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officer of the 1964 batch who served as Governor of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) (India's central bank) from 6 September 2003 until 5 September 2008. Reddy received his M.A. in economics from Madras University, India. He holds a Ph.D. from Osmania University, Hyderabad. The year of award of his doctoral degree or the title of his thesis is not presently available in the public domain. He also holds a Diploma in Economic Planning from the Institute of Social Studies, Netherlands. Reddy was awarded Doctor of Letters (Honoris Causa) by Sri Venkateswara University, India; and Doctor of Civil Law (Honoris Causa) by the University of Mauritius. On 17 July 2008 Reddy was made an Honorary Fellow of the London School of Economics.
Kenneth Rogoff served as Economic Counsellor and Director, Research Department of the International Monetary Fund from August 2001 to September 2003. He was previously a Professor in the Department of Economics at Harvard University and, before that, the Charles and Marie Robertson Professor of International Affairs at Princeton University. Early in his career, Rogoff served as an economist at the International Monetary Fund and also at the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. He is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Science as well as the Econometric Society, and a former Guggenheim Fellow. Mr Rogoff received a B.A. from Yale University summa cum laude in 1975, and a Ph.D. in Economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1980. Mr. Rogoff has published extensively on policy issues in international finance, including exchange rates, international debt issues, and international monetary policy. Together with Maurice Obstfeld, he is co-author of the 1996 graduate text/treatise Foundations of International Macroeconomics. Mr. Rogoff was awarded the life title of international grandmaster of chess by the World Chess Federation (FIDE) in 1978.
Jeffrey D. Sachs is the Director of The Earth Institute, Quetelet Professor of Sustainable Development, and Professor of Health Policy and Management at Columbia University. He is also Special Advisor to United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. From 2002 to 2006, he was Director of the UN Millennium Project and Special Advisor to United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan on the Millennium Development Goals, the internationally agreed goals to reduce extreme poverty, disease, and hunger by the year 2015. Sachs is also President and Co-Founder of Millennium Promise Alliance, a nonprofit organization aimed at ending extreme global poverty.
He is widely considered to be the leading international economic advisor of his generation. For more than 20 years Professor Sachs has been in the forefront of the challenges of economic development, poverty alleviation, and enlightened globalization, promoting policies to help all parts of the world to benefit from expanding economic opportunities and wellbeing. He is also one of the leading voices for combining economic development with environmental sustainability, and as Director of the Earth Institute leads large-scale efforts to promote the mitigation of human-induced climate change.
John Shattuck became Assistant Secretary of the State Department's Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor on June 2, 1993. From 1984-1993 Mr. Shattuck was Vice President of Harvard University, where he also taught human rights and civil liberties law at the Harvard Law School and served as Senior Associate in the Program on Science, Technology and Public Policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government. A longtime human rights advocate, Mr. Shattuck was the Executive Director of the American Civil Liberties Union, Washington Office, from 1976-1984 where he was in charge of directing relations with the U.S. Congress and executive branch agencies. He also served the American Civil Liberties Union as National Counsel, litigating in areas of privacy, government secrecy and political surveillance from 1971-1976. Mr. Shattuck received his LL.B degree from Yale Law School in 1970, an M.A. with First Class Honors in International Law and Jurisprudence from Cambridge University in 1967, and a B.A., magna cum laude, from Yale College in 1965.
Prior to coming to the BIS, Mr. White spent 22 years with the Bank of Canada. His first six years at the Bank of Canada were with the Department of Banking and Financial Analysis, first as an economist and finally as Deputy Chief. In1978 Mr. White became Deputy Chief of the Research Department and was made Chief of the Department in 1979. He was appointed Adviser to the Governor in 1984 and Deputy Governor of the Bank of Canada in September 1988. Mr. White's early career was spent at the Bank of England, where he was an economist from 1969 to 1972. Born in Kenora, Ontario in 1943, Mr. White was educated at the University of Windsor and the University of Manchester.
