Upcoming Distinguished Speaker
Stanley Fischer
Former Vice Chairman of the Federal Reserve
“Monetary Policy Challenges Eleven Years After the Great Recession”
Thursday, May 23rd, 2019
6:00-7:30pm
Click here to RSVP
Stanley Fischer was Vice Chairman of the Federal Reserve from 2014-2017. Previously he served as Governor of the Bank of Israel, was the former Vice Chairman of Citigroup, former First Deputy Managing Director of the IMF, and former Chief Economist at The World Bank. Dr. Fischer received his PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Prior to taking up his position at the Fund, Dr. Fischer was the Killian Professor and the Head of the Department of Economics at MIT, where he was the Ph.D. thesis advisor of Ben Bernanke, Mario Draghi and Greg Mankiw among others. Dr. Fischer is the author of Macroeconomics (with Rudi Dornbusch), and of several other books and has published extensively in professional journals. Fischer contributed significantly to clarifying the limits of the policy-ineffectiveness proposition. Recently, he has joined BlackRock Inc. as senior advisor.
Previous Distinguished Speakers
Richard Thaler
Nobel Laureate, Professor of Economics, Chicago Booth
“Nudge vs. Sludge”: Using Behavioral Economics for Good and Evil
Tuesday, March 5th, 2019 6:00-7:30pm
Korn Convocation Hall, UCLA Anderson School
Richard H. Thaler, the Charles R. Walgreen Distinguished Service Professor of Behavioral Science and Economics at Chicago Booth, is the 2017 recipient of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. Professor Thaler studies behavioral economics and finance as well as the psychology of decision-making which lies in the gap between economics and psychology. He has applied insight from behavioral economics to study portfolio diversification, the equity-risk premium puzzle, and retirement savings. He is the co-author of the global best seller “Nudge” (2008) and the author of “Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics” (2015).
Greg Ip
Thursday, February 7th, 2019
Korn Convocation Hall, UCLA Anderson School
“A New Cold War? The Emerging Economic Contest Between the U.S. and China”
Greg Ip is chief economics commentator for The Wall Street Journal. Previously he was U.S. economics editor for The Economist. Greg comments regularly on television and radio, including CNBC, National Public Radio, and the PBS Newshour. He has won or shared in several prizes for journalism. He is the author of “the Little Book of Economics: How the Economy Works in the Real World” (2010) and “Foolproof: Why Safety Can Be Dangerous and How Danger Makes Us Safe,” (2015).
Professor Edward Lazear
“The US Economy and Its Place in the World”
Date/Time: Tuesday, November 6, 2018
Location: Royce Hall
Edward Lazear is a labor economist who is a founder of a field known as personnel economics. His research centers on employee incentives, promotions, compensation, and productivity in firms. He also has devoted study to culture and language, with an emphasis on explaining the rise in multiculturalism in the United States. Recent work includes an already widely known theory of educational production. His current research is on entrepreneurship, leadership, and its relation to personnel economics.
Professor Lazear is the Morris Arnold and Nona Jean Cox Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Davies Family Professor of Economics at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business. He has taught previously at the University of Chicago’s Graduate School of Business.
Lazear served as Chairman of the President’s Council of Economics Advisers and was at the White House from 2006 to 2009. In his position as the chief economic advisor to the President, he advised on a broad range of matters that involve both micro and macroeconomic issues.
Nobel Laureate, Professor Jean Tirole
Jean Tirole was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics for his analysis of market power and regulation. According to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences press release, “before Tirole, researchers and policymakers sought general principles for all industries. He has shown that the best regulation or competition policy should be carefully adapted to every industry’s specific conditions. In a series of articles and books, Tirole has presented a general framework for designing such policies and applied it to a number of industries, ranging from telecommunications to banking. Drawing on these new insights, governments can better encourage powerful firms to become more productive and, at the same time, prevent them from harming competitors and customers.”
Tirole is chairman of the Toulouse School of Economics and the Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse. In addition to holding numerous honorary degrees, he earned his Ph.D. from MIT where he is visiting faculty.
Nobel Laureate, Professor Thomas Sargent
Thomas J. Sargent joined New York University as the first W.R. Berkley Professor in September 2002, a joint appointment by the Economics Department at NYU’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences and the Stern School of Business. He was awarded the 2011 Nobel Prize in Economics, shared with Princeton University’s Christopher Sims. He has done work on a variety of empirical and theoretical topics in macroeconomics, in particular the formation of expectations and its role in determining the impact of economic policy.
Nobel Laureate, Professor James Heckman
James J. Heckman is a Nobel Memorial Prize winner in economics and the Henry Schultz Distinguished Service Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago. He has conducted groundbreaking work with a consortium of economists, psychologists, sociologists, statisticians and neuroscientists showing that quality early childhood development heavily influences health, economic and social outcomes for individuals and society at large.
Vice President & Chief Economist Amazon, Patrick Bajari
Patrick Bajari is Vice President and Chief Economist at Amazon. Since joining in 2010, he has helped Amazon build teams in econometrics, machine learning and research science. His team of econometricians and developers have worked on software that operates pricing, supply chain, operations, automated marketing, search and other systems at Amazon. He is a Fellow of the Econometric Society and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Prior to joining amazon, he was a faulty member at Harvard, Stanford, Duke, Michigan and Minnesota. In addition, he has consulted for the US Federal Trade Commission, the Federal Reserve System and the Boston Consulting Group.
Professor Robert Barro
Robert J. Barro is Paul M. Warburg Professor of Economics at Harvard University, a senior fellow of the Hoover Institution of Stanford University, and a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. He has a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University and a B.S. in physics from Caltech.
His research includes empirical determinants of economic growth, economic effects of public debt and budget deficits, and the formation of monetary policy.
He was a viewpoint columnist for Business Week from 1998 to 2006 and a contributing editor of The Wall Street Journal from 1991 to 1998. He has written extensively on macroeconomics and economic growth.
Professor Martin Feldstein
Dr. Feldstein is the George F. Baker Professor of Economics at Harvard University and President Emeritus of the National Bureau of Economic Research. From 1982-1984, he was Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors and President Ronald Reagan’s Chief Economic Advisor. He was a member of the President’s foreign Intelligence Advisory Board under President George W. Bush and of the President’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board under President Barack Obama.