Speaker Biographies
John Abowd is the associate director for research and methodology and chief scientist at the U.S. Census Bureau. He is the Edmund Ezra Day Professor of Economics at Cornell University and teaches statistics and information science. He is also a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (on leave while serving in the federal government), research affiliate at the Centre de Recherche en Economie et Statistique (CREST), and research fellow at the Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) and at IAB (Institut für Arbeitsmarkt-und Berufsforschung). He is the past president and fellow of the Society of Labor Economists, past chair of the Business and Economic Statistics Section and fellow of the American Statistical Association, elected member of the International Statistical Institute, and a fellow of the Econometric Society. He has served as distinguished senior research fellow at the Census Bureau and on the National Academies' Committee on National Statistics. He currently serves on the American Economic Association's Committee on Economic Statistics. He was the past director of the Cornell Institute for Social and Economic Research. His research focuses on the creation, dissemination, privacy protection, and use of linked, longitudinal data on employees and employers.
David Altig is executive vice president and director of research at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. In addition to advising the Bank president on monetary policy and related matters, Altig oversees the Bank's regional executives and research department. He also serves as a member of the Bank's management and discount committees. He leads the Atlanta Fed's macroblog, which provides commentary on economic topics, including monetary policy, macroeconomic developments, and the Southeast economy. Altig also serves as an adjunct professor of economics in the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago, where he was the recipient of the 2010 Einhorn award for excellence in executive MBA teaching. In 2016, he was elected to a three-year term as a director of the National Association for Business Economics. He is also a member of the board of the Global Interdependence Center and the advisory board of Atlanta-based Neighborhood Nexus. Prior to joining the Atlanta Fed, Altig served as vice president and associate director of research at the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland. He joined the Cleveland Fed in 1991 as an economist before being promoted in 1997. Before joining the Cleveland Fed, he was a faculty member in the department of business economics and public policy at Indiana University. He also has lectured at the Ohio State University, Brown University, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland State University, Duke University, John Carroll University, Kent State University, the University of Iowa, and the University of Wisconsin, as well as in the Chinese Executive MBA program sponsored by the University of Minnesota and Lingnan College of Sun Yat-Sen University. Altig graduated from the University of Iowa with a bachelor's in business administration. He earned his master's and doctorate in economics from Brown University.
Patrick Bayer's research focuses on a wide range of subjects such as racial inequality and segregation, social interactions, discrimination, neighborhood effects, housing market dynamics, education, and criminal justice. His most recent work has been published in Econometrica, Review of Economic Studies, American Economic Journal, and Quarterly Journal of Economics. He is currently working on projects related to racial earnings inequality, residential segregation and intergenerational mobility, speculation in housing markets, and tests for bias in jury decision making and policing. Bayer is currently a professor of economics at Duke University and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He previously served as chair of the Duke Economics Department. He received his doctorate in economics from Stanford University and his bachelor of arts in mathematics from Princeton University. He served on the faculty at Yale University for seven years before joining the Duke Economics Department in 2006.
Katarína Borovičková is an assistant professor at New York University. Her research focuses on labor markets and macroeconomics. In her recent work, she seeks to understand sources of duration dependence in the job finding probability, and the relationship between fluctuations of discount rates and employment over the business cycle. Borovičková received her doctorate at the University of Chicago.
Raphael Bostic is the 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. In addition, he serves on the Federal Reserve's chief monetary policy body, the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC). Bostic is the former Bedrosian Chair in Governance and the Public Enterprise at the Sol Price School of Public Policy at the University of Southern California; he previously served as a professor in the School of Policy, Planning, and Development. From 2009 to 2012, Bostic served as assistant secretary for policy development and research at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). He worked at the Federal Reserve Board of Governors from 1995 to 2001, serving as an economist and then a senior economist in the monetary and financial studies section, where his work on the Community Reinvestment Act earned him a special achievement award. Bostic served as special assistant to HUD's assistant secretary of policy development and research in 1999. He graduated from Harvard University in 1987 with a combined major in economics and psychology. He earned his doctorate in economics from Stanford University in 1995. He has previously served on many boards and advisory committees, including the California Community Reinvestment Corporation, Abode Communities, NeighborWorks, the National Community Stabilization Trust, the Urban Land Institute, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the American Real Estate and Urban Economics Association, the National Economic Association, and Freddie Mac.
Eric French is a professor of economics at University College London, codirector of the ESRC Centre for the Microeconomic Analysis of Public Policy, Institute for Fiscal Studies, and a fellow at the Institute for Fiscal Studies and Centre for Economic Policy Research. HIs research interests include household behavior over the life cycle; the impact of government and private pensions on savings and labor supply; the impact of health insurance on medical spending, savings, and labor supply; the impact of disability insurance programs on labor supply; the impact of the minimum wage on employment and spending of minimum wage households; and dynamic structural modeling. French's research has been published in Econometrica, the Review of Economic Studies, American Economic Review, Journal of Political Economy, Handbook of Labor Economics, Handbook of the Economics of Population Aging, Annual Review of Economics, Review of Economics and Statistics, Journal of Labor Economics, International Economic Review, Journal of Applied Econometrics, Journal of Human Resources, Economic Journal, Fiscal Studies, American Economic Journal: Policy, and other publications. Previously, he was a senior economist and research adviser on the microeconomics team in the economic research department at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, and he taught at the Department of Economics and the business school at Northwestern University. French received a bachelor of arts in economics from the University of California–Berkeley and master of science and doctorate in economics from the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
Kyle Herkenhoff is an assistant professor of economics at the University of Minnesota and a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. He received his doctorate from the University of California–Los Angeles in 2014. His research focuses on the interaction of labor markets and consumer credit markets, placing equal weight on theory and empirics. Herkenhoff is actively developing and estimating structural sorting models and building new databases in order to advance the profession's understanding of topics such as the impact of credit access on labor market mobility, wage inequality, sorting, and aggregate productivity.
Erik Hurst is a macroeconomist whose work focuses on housing markets, labor markets, and household financial behavior. One strand of Hurst's research explores the importance of home production in determining time series, life cycle, and business cycle variation in measured consumption spending. His contributions to this literature include "Consumption versus Expenditure" and "Deconstructing Life Cycle Expenditure" in the Journal of Political Economy, "Life Cycle Prices and Production" and "Time Use during the Great Recession" in American Economic Review, and "Measuring Trends in Leisure: The Allocation of Time over Five Decades" in Quarterly Journal of Economics. His work on these issues has been extensively covered in the New York Times, Washington Post, and Economist. In 2006, Hurst was awarded the TIAA-CREF Paul A. Samuelson Award for Outstanding Scholarly Writing on Lifelong Financial Security for the work examining how individuals use home production to maintain their consumption during retirement. Hurst is a member of the Economic Fluctuations Group, Aging Group, and Public Economics Group at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He is currently serving as the editor of the Journal of Political Economy. Additionally, he serves as a consultant to the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. Hurst earned a bachelor's in economics and finance from Clarkson University in 1993. He received a master's in economics in 1995 and doctorate in economics in 1999 from the University of Michigan. He joined the Chicago Booth faculty in 1999.
Lisa Kahn is a labor economist at Yale University with interests in organizations and education. Her most recent work uses data on job vacancy postings to examine whether the Great Recession accelerated technological change, exacerbating polarization of the U.S. economy. She is also working on understanding trade-offs in allocating discretion versus having fixed rules in hiring and performance management. In previous work, she examined the consequences of graduating from college in an economic downturn, finding surprisingly long-lasting, negative wage effects. 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 and is currently a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research and an IZA research fellow. Kahn earned her bachelor's in economics from the University of Chicago and master's and doctorate in economics from Harvard University.
John Kennan is the Richard Meese Chaired Professor of Economics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. 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. 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.
Karen Kopecky is a research economist and associate adviser on the macroeconomics team in the research department at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. Her major field of study is macroeconomics with particular interests in public finance, insurance markets, retirement, and computational methods for macroeconomic modeling. Kopecky received her doctorate in economics in 2007 and her master's in economics in 2003, both from the University of Rochester. She received her bachelor of arts in economics and her bachelor of science in mathematics from the State University of New York at Buffalo in 2001.
Thibaut Lamadon specializes in labor markets and matching theory. His most recent work examines the effect of productivity shocks on other variables in labor markets. He joined the University of Chicago Department of Economics faculty as an assistant professor after spending the 2014 to 2015 year as a Becker Friedman Institute Research Fellow. In 2011, Lamadon was a visiting student at the Cowles Foundation at Yale University. He was also awarded the Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award at University College London. As an undergraduate, Lamadon studied electrical and computer engineering at Supelec in his native France. He went on to earn a master's of science at the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2005. He received his doctorate in economics from University College London.
Rasmus Lentz is a 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 in economics from the University of Copenhagen and doctorate in economics from Northwestern University.
Jeremy Lise is associate professor of economics at the University of Minnesota. He serves on the editorial board of the Review of Economic Studies and as associate editor of Review of Economic Dynamics and European Economic Review. Prior to joining the University of Minnesota, Lise was associate professor at University College London. He holds a doctorate from Queen's University.
Magne Mogstad is the Gary Becker Professor in Economics at the University of Chicago. His work is motivated by the broad question of how to address market failures and equalize opportunities. Countless policies—taxation, subsidized education, social insurance—have been implemented in an effort to achieve those objectives. A key challenge is to distill each policy's unique impact so that we can understand which ones actually work and which do not. This challenge motivates Mogstad's work, which aims at providing empirical evidence that allows us to test economic theories and inform policymakers. This is made possible by combining theory and credible empirical methods with large administrative data sets that can be linked to supplementary data sources. Mogstad has published extensively in leading scholarly journals. He is the editor of the Journal of Political Economy and Journal of Public Economics, and he is the recipient of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship and the IZA Young Labor Economist award.
Andreas Mueller joined 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 as well as employed workers. Mueller's research has been published in leading academic journals and has been covered in the Economist, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Financial Times. Mueller is a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research and a research fellow at the Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
Luigi Pistaferri is a professor of economics at Stanford University. He graduated summa cum laude from Istituto Universitario Navale in Naples (Italy) in 1993, completed a master's in economics at Bocconi University in Milan (Italy) in 1995 and a doctorate in economics at University College London in 1999. Pistaferri's research is mainly on household choices: consumption, saving, portfolio allocation, labor supply, and time use. His papers have appeared in the American Economic Review, Econometrica, Review of Economic Studies, Quarterly Journal of Economics, Journal of Political Economy, Journal of Economic Perspectives, and Annual Review of Economics, among other publications. He is the Ralph Landau Senior Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic and Policy Research, and a fellow of the Econometric Society, the National Bureau of Economic Research, the Center for Economics and Policy Research, and IZA. Since 2012 he has been one of the coeditors of the American Economic Review.
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 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 senior policy adviser and economist on the macroeconomics and monetary policy team in the research department 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, he 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. 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, Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, and 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. Rogerson serves as an adviser to the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta's Center for Human Capital Studies.
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, Journal of Political Economy, Quarterly Journal of Economics, Review of Economic Studies, Journal of Economic Literature, and American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics. Shimer serves as an adviser to the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta's Center for Human Capital Studies.
Christopher Taber joined the University of Wisconsin–Madison faculty in 2007 as the Richard A. Meese Chair of Applied Econometrics. His research focuses on the development and implementation of econometric models of skill formation. His work on economics of education includes studies of the effectiveness of Catholic schools and of voucher programs, the importance of borrowing constraints in college going decisions, and general equilibrium models of the labor market. He also has a methodological side and has worked on nonexperimental methods for evaluation. He has been editor-in-chief of the Journal of Labor Economics since October 2007. Taber received his bachelor of science, master of arts, and doctorate from the University of Chicago.
Arlene Wong is an assistant professor of economics at the Department of Economics at Princeton University. She is also a faculty research fellow in the National Bureau of Economic Research Economic Fluctuations and Growth and Monetary Economics programs. Prior to joining Princeton, she was a junior research scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. Wong conducts research across a number of topics in macroeconomics, monetary economics, household consumption, and labor dynamics.