Speaker Biographies
Amanda Agan joined the Rutgers University economics department of in Fall 2016. Her research focuses on the economics of crime and labor economics. Agan's research has analyzed the unintended consequences of policies such as sex offender registration and ban-the-box laws. She has published studies in the Journal of Law and Economics and the Journal of Empirical and Legal Studies. Prior to joining Rutgers University she was a postdoctoral research associate in the economics department and the industrial relations section at Princeton University. She received her PhD in economics from the University of Chicago and her bachelor's degree in economics from George Mason University.
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. 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.
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. 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 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. He graduated from Harvard University with a combined major in economics and psychology. He earned his doctorate in economics from Stanford University.
Raj Chetty is the William A. Ackman Professor of Economics at Harvard University and is one of the youngest tenured professors in Harvard's history. He is also the director of the Equality of Opportunity Project, which uses data to understand how children from disadvantaged backgrounds might have better chances of succeeding. Chetty's research combines empirical evidence and economic theory to help design more effective government policies. His work on topics ranging from tax policy and unemployment insurance to education and affordable housing has been widely cited in academia, media outlets, and congressional testimony. Before joining the faculty at Harvard, he was a professor at the University of California, Berkeley and Stanford University. Chetty has received numerous awards for his research, including a MacArthur "Genius" Fellowship and the John Bates Clark medal, given to the economist under 40 whose work is judged to have made the most significant contribution to the field. Chetty received his PhD from Harvard University.
David Dorn holds the chair of international trade and labor markets at the University of Zurich. He has previously been an associate professor at CEMFI Madrid, a visiting professor at Harvard University, and a visiting scholar at Boston University, MIT, and the University of Chicago. His current research studies the impact of trade and technology on labor markets as well as patterns of economic geography. He holds a PhD in economics from the University of St. Gallen.
Christopher L. Foote is a senior economist and policy adviser in the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston's research department. His research and policy interests include housing and the macroeconomics of the labor market. Foote joined the Boston Fed in 2003 after serving as chief economist for the Council of Economic Advisers. Also in 2003, he served for five months as an economic adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad, Iraq. Foote graduated from the College of William and Mary in 1987 and then worked for two years as a newspaper reporter in Harrisonburg, Virginia. From 1996 to 2002, Foote taught in the economics department at Harvard University. Each spring, he teaches intermediate macroeconomics at Harvard University, where he was named a professor of the practice of economics in 2012. He earned a PhD in economics from the University of Michigan.
Veronica Guerrieri studies macroeconomics, search theory, labor and financial market frictions, dynamic contracting, and growth theory. She joined the University of Chicago Booth School of Business in 2006 and has been a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research since 2013 and a consultant at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago since 2014. Guerrieri won the Bernácer Prize in 2015, the Carlo Alberto medal in 2013, the Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship in 2011, the Excellence Award in Global Economic Affairs in 2010 from the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, and the Excellence in Refereeing Award in 2008 and 2012 from the American Economic Review. Since July 2017, Guerrieri has been a managing editor of the Review of Economic Studies, and since 2014 she has been a member of the board of editors of the Journal of Economic Literature. Guerrieri earned her bachelor's degree and master's degree in economics from Università Commerciale Luigi Bocconi in Milan and a PhD in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Fatih Guvenen is the Curtis L. Carlson professor of economics at the University of Minnesota and a research associate in the National Bureau of Economic Research's economic fluctuations and growth program. He also serves as an adviser to the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. He has held visiting or full-time academic positions at various institutions, including the University of Rochester, New York University's Stern School of Business, Yale University, and the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. His papers have appeared in the American Economic Review, Econometrica, Review of Economic Studies, Journal of Political Economy, Journal of the European Economic Association, and Journal of Monetary Economics. His work has been supported by grants from the National Science Foundation, the Retirement Research Consortium, the Russell Sage Foundation, and other organizations. He received his bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey, and his master's degree and PhD in economics from Carnegie Mellon University.
Lisa Kahn is a professor of economics at the University of Rochester. 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 has also developed a methodology for measuring the contributions of employer learning and productivity evolution in determining life-cycle earnings. In previous work, she examined the consequences of graduating from college in an economic downturn. She was previously an associate professor of economics at the Yale School of Management. 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. She holds a degree in economics from the University of Chicago and a master's degree and PhD in economics from Harvard University.
Loukas Karabarbounis is an associate professor of economics at the University of Minnesota. He is also a consultant at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He serves as a member of the editorial board of the American Economic Review and an associate editor at the Journal of Monetary Economics. Prior to joining the University of Minnesota, he was an associate professor of economics at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. He has served as a senior research economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. His latest research has focused on topics such as the global decline in labor's share of income, productivity and capital flows in southern Europe, cyclicality and dispersion in labor markets, and the effects of unemployment insurance policy on macroeconomic outcomes. He is the recipient of a research fellowship awarded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. He received a PhD in economics from Harvard University and an undergraduate degree from the Athens University of Economics and Business in Greece.
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 bachelor's degree from University College Dublin and his doctorate from Northwestern University.
Ioana Marinescu is an economist who studies the labor market to craft policies that can enhance employment, productivity, and economic security. Her research expertise includes online job search, workforce development, antitrust and workers, unemployment insurance, the universal basic income, and employment contracts. Marinescu's research has been published in leading academic journals including the Journal of Labor Economics and the Journal of Public Economics. She writes a monthly op-ed for the French newspaper Liberation. Marinescu is a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research.
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. Prior to joining the Bank in 2002, Pitts was an assistant professor of economics at Georgia State University. Pitts has published in several journals, including the Review of Economics and Statistics, the American Economic Review, Archives of Internal Medicine, and Southern Economic Journal. She also contributes to the Atlanta Fed's macroblog. She received her bachelor of arts in economics from Clemson University and her master's degree and doctorate in economics from North Carolina State University.
Tommaso Porzio is an assistant professor of economics at University of California San Diego. He is also a research affiliate at the Centre for Economic Policy Research and the Yale Research Initiative on Innovation and Scale. Recently, Porzio has worked on topics such as the slow accumulation of human capital from work experience in developing countries, the differences across countries in the assignment of individuals to production teams and technology, the East-West Germany persistent divide, and the role of human capital deepening for labor reallocation out of agriculture. He received his PhD in economics from Yale University.
Esteban Rossi-Hansberg is the Theodore A. Well '29 Professor of Economics at Princeton University, where he has been since 2005. Previously, he was an assistant professor at Stanford University. His research specializes in international trade, regional and urban economics, as well as growth and organizational economics. He has published extensively in all the major journals in economics. In 2007 he received the Alfred Sloan Research Fellowship and in 2010 he received the August Lösch Prize and the Geoffrey Hewings Award. He is a fellow of the Econometric Society and a member of the National Bureau of Economic Research and the Centre for Economic Policy Research. He has also been an associate editor of the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the American Economic Review, the Journal of Monetary Economics, and the Journal of Urban Economics, among other journals. He graduated from the University of Chicago.
Richard Rogerson joined the faculty of Princeton University in 2011, where he is the Charles and Marie Robertson Professor of Economics and Public Affairs. He has 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 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 has held several editorial positions, most recently 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 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. Rogerson serves as an adviser to the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta's Center for Human Capital Studies. He received his doctorate in economics from the University of Minnesota.
Jesse Rothstein is professor of public policy and economics at the University of California, Berkeley, where he directs the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment and the California Policy Lab. He is a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. From 2009 to 2010, he served as a senior economist for the Council of Economic Advisers and as chief economist at the U.S. Department of Labor. His research focuses on education and tax policy, particularly on the way that public institutions ameliorate or reinforce the effects of children's families on their academic and economic outcomes. He has conducted studies on teacher evaluation, the value of school infrastructure spending, affirmative action in college and graduate school admissions, and the causes and consequences of racial segregation. He has also written about the effects of unemployment insurance on job search and labor force participation, the role of structural factors in impeding recovery from the Great Recession, and the incidence of the Earned Income Tax Credit. Rothstein has a PhD in economics from the University of California, Berkeley, and an master's degree from the Goldman School of Public Policy.
Robert Shimer is the department chair and the Alvin H. Baum Professor in Economics at the University of Chicago. Prior to joining the Chicago faculty in 2003, he 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 National Bureau of Economic Research's economic fluctuations and growth macro perspectives group and has served as editor of the Journal of Political Economy. Shimer's research focuses 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. He received his doctorate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Stefanie Stantcheva is a professor of economics at Harvard University. She was a junior fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows from 2014 to 2016 before joining the Harvard Department of Economics. Her research focuses on the optimal design of the tax system and public policies, taking into account labor market features, more complex social preferences, and long-term effects such as human capital acquisition and innovation by people and firms. Part of this work is centered around the study of empirical effects of taxation of individuals and firms on inequality, top incomes, migration, human capital, and innovation. She also explores how people form their social preferences towards redistribution using large-scale online survey and experiment tools. Since May 2018, Stantcheva has been a part of the French Council of Economic Advisers. She received her PhD in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Christopher Tonetti is an associate professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, where he teaches growth and stabilization in the global economy in the MBA program. His research is in the area of macroeconomics, with a focus on growth and household finance. His growth research focuses on how firms' investments in innovation and technology adoption contribute to aggregate growth. Recently he has studied how changes in trade policy can alter the competitive environment and affect growth rates by altering the technology adoption patterns of firms. His household finance research focuses on the dynamics of household wealth, income, and consumption over time and over the lifecycle. His recent work studies the savings, consumption, and labor supply patterns of the elderly and their desire for annuities, for insurance against late in life health risks, and to leave bequests. Tonetti received his bachelor's degree in economics-mathematics from Columbia University and his PhD in economics from New York University.