Speaker Biographies
Mark Bils is Hazel Fyfe Professor of Economics at the University of Rochester and a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). After receiving his bachelor's degree from The Ohio State University and doctorate in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Bils joined the University of Rochester in 1985. Previously, he taught at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business from 1989 to 1992. He has also been a visiting fellow at the NBER and the Hoover Institution and a visiting professor at MIT. Bils's research has considered questions such as how wage setting and pricing contribute to business-cycle fluctuations, the importance of schooling in explaining country differences in growth, and measuring the importance of new and better consumer products.
Gabriel Chodorow-Reich is an assistant professor of economics at Harvard University. His research focuses on macroeconomics, finance, and labor markets. He received his doctorate from the University of California at Berkeley in 2013. From 2009 to 2010, he served as an economist on the White House Council of Economic Advisers. Chodorow-Reich received his bachelor's degree magna cum laude in social studies from Harvard in 2005.
Timothy Dunne is a research economist and adviser in the research department at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. Before he joined the Bank in 2013, Dunne was a vice president at the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, where he led the research department's Regional Issues Group. He joined the Cleveland Fed in 2006 as a senior economic adviser. In 2009, he served as Chong K. Liew Professor of Economics at the University of Oklahoma. He returned to the Cleveland Fed in 2010 and was appointed vice president. Prior to joining the Federal Reserve, he was director of research in the office of the chief economist at the U.S. Bureau of the Census. Dunne earned his bachelor of arts in economics and history from the College of William and Mary and his doctorate in economics from Pennsylvania State University.
John Fernald is a senior research adviser in the economic research department of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. Prior to his current position, he was vice president and team leader for the San Francisco Fed's macroeconomics research group. 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. He spent 2015 on leave from the San Francisco Fed, living in Paris while visiting INSEAD Business School and the Banque de France (the French central bank), and living in Rome while visiting the Einaudi Institute for Economics and Finance. He previously taught at the University of Michigan and the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business. Fernald received his bachelor's and doctorate degrees in economics from Harvard University and master's degree in economics from the London School of Economics. He has regularly published in both academic and policy-oriented journals, including the Journal of Political Economy, the American Economic Review, the Journal of Monetary Economics, and the NBER Macroeconomics Annual. His research interests include measuring productivity and technology, understanding the cyclical effects of technology shocks, and estimating the effects of Chinese monetary policy.
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 Hall's Stanford web page, Stanford.edu/~rehall.
Chang-Tai Hsieh conducts research on growth and development at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. Hsieh has published in top economic journals such as the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the American Economic Review, and the Journal of Political Economy. He has been a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Banks of San Francisco, New York, and Minneapolis as well as the World Bank's Development Economics Group and the Economic Planning Agency in Japan. He is a research associate for the NBER, a senior fellow at the Bureau for Research in Economic Analysis of Development, and a member of the Steering Group of the International Growth Center in London. He is the recipient of an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Research Fellowship, an elected member of Academia Sinica in Taiwan, and the recipient of the Sun Ye-Fang award for research on the Chinese economy.
Nir Jaimovich is a macroeconomist at the University of Southern California (USC) Marshall School of Business, specializing in business cycles and the dynamics of the labor market. He is an associate editor of the Journal of Monetary Economics and the Journal of Economic Theory, and a research associate in the NBER Economic Fluctuations and Growth program. Before joining USC, Jaimovich was on the faculty at Duke University, Stanford University, and the University of California–San Diego.
Lisa Kahn is a labor economist at Yale University with interests in organizations and education. Her most recent work examines the impact of the Great Recession on employment across firms of varying quality. She finds that employment at low-paying firms is generally more sheltered than that at high-paying firms. She has also examined the consequences of graduating from college in a bad economy, finding surprisingly long-lasting, negative wage effects. Her related work suggests that college graduates who majored in more technical and higher-paying fields are generally sheltered from this effect, but that was not the case during the Great Recession. From 2010 to 2011, Kahn served on President Obama's Council of Economic Advisers as the senior economist for labor and education policy. She has also been a visiting fellow at Brookings Institution. Kahn earned her bachelor's degree in economics from the University of Chicago and master's and doctorate degrees in economics from Harvard University.
John Kennan is the Richard Meese Chaired Professor of Economics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Over his long career, he has held visiting faculty positions at University College London, Yale University, the University of Melbourne, and Stanford University, among other institutions, and was a professor at the University of Iowa and Brown University. Kennan is a fellow of the Society of Labor Economists and the Econometric Society and a research fellow at the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA). He is a member of the American Economic Association, the Society for Economic Dynamics, the Irish Economic Association, and the European Economic Association. Kennan's current professional appointments include positions as a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and as an affiliate of the University of Wisconsin's Institute for Research on Poverty. Between 2003 and 2008, he served as coeditor of the Journal of Labor Economics. Kennan earned his doctorate from Northwestern University and bachelor's degree from University College Dublin.
Rasmus Lentz is an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Previously, he was assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and assistant professor at Boston University from 2002 to 2005. Lentz's research lies in the intersection of macro and labor economics with a particular focus on the impact of worker and firm heterogeneity on labor market outcomes. Lentz received his master's degree in economics from the University of Copenhagen and doctorate in economics from Northwestern University.
Dennis P. Lockhart is the 14th president and chief executive officer of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. He is responsible for all the Bank's activities, including monetary policy, bank supervision and regulation, and payment services. He also serves on the Federal Reserve's chief monetary policy body, the Federal Open Market Committee. From 2003 to 2007, Lockhart was 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/operator of emerging markets venture capital/private equity funds. Lockhart also was managing partner at the private equity firm Zephyr Management LP, based in New York. Earlier in his career, Lockhart was president of Heller International Group, which had activities in commercial finance and merchant banking in Europe, Latin America, and Asia. In 2000, he served as chairman of the advisory committee of the U.S. Export-Import Bank. Lockhart earned a bachelor's degree in political science and economics from Stanford University and a master's degree in international economics and American foreign policy from the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. He also attended the senior executive program at MIT's Sloan School of Management.
Andreas I. Mueller joined the Columbia Business School in 2011. He received his doctorate from the IIES, Stockholm University, and was awarded the Arnbergska Prize for his dissertation work by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. His research spans a broad spectrum of issues in macroeconomics, labor economics, and monetary economics. A central focus of his research is the labor market and, more specifically, the interaction between the business cycle and unemployment. He has also done extensive research on the job search behavior of unemployed workers.
Melinda Pitts is the research center 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. Pitts has published in several journals, including Industrial Relations, the American Economic Review, Archives of Internal Medicine, and Research in 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.
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. Rogerson 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.
Ayşegül 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, an Economic Theory fellow in the Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory, a fellow of the Society of Labor Economists, 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.
Isaac Sorkin is an assistant professor of economics at Stanford University. He was previously an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. Sorkin received his bachelor's degree in economics and mathematics from Swarthmore College and doctorate in economics from the University of Michigan.
Robert G. Valletta is vice president for research communications and an economist in the economic research department at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. He completed his doctorate in economics at Harvard University and undergraduate degree in economics from the University of California–Berkeley. Valletta served eight years on the faculty at the University of California–Irvine, before joining the San Francisco Fed in 1995. He spent a year on leave during 2000 to 2001, working at the OECD in Paris. His research is primarily in the field of labor economics, focusing on topics such as long-term unemployment, part-time work, job security and job mobility, income inequality and poverty, labor unions, and the effects of public assistance programs and employer-provided health insurance on labor market outcomes. Valletta has published widely in leading economics journals, including the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, the Review of Economics and Statistics, the Journal of Labor Economics, the Journal of Human Resources, and the Journal of Economic Perspectives. He serves on the editorial board of the journal Industrial Relations.