Speakers at the 2007 NABE Annual Meeting
Jason Benderly
Benderly Economics
John Bertko
F.S.A., M.A.A.A
John M. Bertko, F.S.A., M.A.A.A., served as vice president and chief actuary for Humana Inc., where he managed the corporate actuarial group and directed the coordination of work by actuaries in Humana's major business units, including public programs, commercial, individual, and TRICARE. Mr. Bertko has extensive experience with risk adjustment and has served in several public policy advisory roles, including prescription drug benefit design. He served the American Academy of Actuaries as a board member from 1994 to 1996 and as vice president for the health practice area from 1995 to 1996. He was a member of the Actuarial Board for Counseling and Discipline from 1996 through 2002. Mr. Bertko is a fellow of the Society of Actuaries and a member of the American Academy of Actuaries. He has a B.S. in mathematics from Case Western Reserve University.
Maria Bertram
Global Insight
Maria manages the international trade consulting business segment in Global Insight's Global Trade & Transportation practice. While at Global Insight Mrs. Bertram's work has concentrated in international trade and macroeconomic analysis, port development and hinterland transportation, shipping industry performance and seaborne transportation costs. In this capacity she directed the development of a financial model analyzing toll increases and alternative financing mechanisms for expansion of the Panama Canal. Mrs. Bertram recently managed Global Insight's work on the Legal and Economic Analysis of Tramp Shipping study commissioned by the European Commission and completed cargo forecasts for a number of countries in the Indian Ocean. Mrs. Bertram recently returned from Nicaragua where she completed a cargo forecast and competitiveness analysis for the Port of Corinto.
Mrs. Bertram has her Masters degree in International Economics and Finance from Brandeis University and her Bachelors of Economics from Miami University in Oxford Ohio.
Brian A. Bethune
Global Insight
Dr. Bethune is Director of Financial Economics for Global Insight's United States Macroeconomics Group. Prior to this, he was Manager, Business Economics Group for Caterpillar Inc., and senior financial economist for the Bank of Montreal/Harris Bank Group. He has worked on special assignments at the World Trade Organization, Geneva, Switzerland, and the Institute of International Finance, Washington D.C. Bethune is responsible for high-frequency economic analysis and the weekly financial report. In addition, Bethune develops and supports US macroeconomic model resources for credit and financial markets, interest and borrowing rates, the flow of funds, government debt and deficits, government expenditures, and taxation.
His areas of Expertise at Global Insight include: Federal Reserve analysis and monetary policy decisions; Credit market dynamics, financial regulation, and the flow of funds; Interest rates, borrowing rates, financial modeling, and the yield curve; High-frequency US economic developments and their impact on equity, bond, and currency markets; Government budgets and debt; Government policies: revenues, expenditures, and policy simulations
Bethune is the author of several professional and academic articles that have appeared in publications such as Business Economics, as well as in the Canadian Tax Journal. Bethune holds a Doctorate of Philosophy in international economics from the University of Geneva, Switzerland. He also holds a Master of Arts from McMaster University, Canada, and a Certificate in Advanced Monetary Economics from the Kiel Institute of World Economics, Kiel, Germany.
James Bianco
Bianco Research LLC
Since November 1990, he has been producing fixed income commentaries with a circulation of hundreds of portfolio managers and traders. Jim’s commentaries are primarily devoted to the fixed income markets with special emphasis on: money flow characteristics of primary dealers, mutual funds, hedge funds, futures traders, banks, and institutional investors. Other topics he has researched include: the effects of commodity prices on bond yields, how the ratio of the equity market’s capitalization as a percentage of nominal gross domestic product affects price performance of the stock market, the role government regulation plays in determining inflation, how market performance affects mutual fund investors, the role politics plays in setting interest rates, and measuring the stock and bond markets from a total-return perspective.
Jim produces unique and original insights into movements in the financial markets and has been a featured speaker at many investment conferences. He is regularly featured in the following investment publications: The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Barrons, US News And World Report, BusinessWeek, Forbes, Fortune, The National Review, Euromoney, and Grant's Interest Rate Observer in addition to the Dow Jones, Reuters, Knight-Ridder and Associated Press newswires. He has also written for Technical Analysis of Stocks and Commodities, Financial Trader and Futures Magazine and has appeared numerous times on CNBC, CNN, Bloomberg and Fox News.
Prior to joining Arbor and Bianco Research, Jim spent five years in New York City with several prominent investment banking firms. He was a Market Strategist in equity and fixed income research at UBS Securities and Equity Technical Analyst at First Boston and Shearson Lehman Brothers. He is a Chartered Market Technician (CMT) and a member of the Market Technicians Association (MTA), where he served as a national Vice-President and Chairman of the MTA’s 1996 annual seminar.
Mr. Bianco is married with three children and resides in Chicago. He has a Bachelor of Science degree in Finance from Marquette University (1984) and an MBA from Fordham University (1989).
Beth Ann Bovino
Senior Economist
Standard & Poor’s
Beth Ann Bovino is a senior economist at Standard & Poor’s, based in New York. In this position, she works with David Wyss, the chief economist, on S&P’s economic forecasts and publications, and co-authors the weekly Financial Notes and Weekly Economics Call. Beth Ann has created Industry Drivers reports for analyst research. She is quoted regularly in the press and has appeared on many major television programs. Further, she has written many articles for popular and professional publications.
Prior to joining Standard and Poor’s in February 2004, Beth Ann spent over ten years doing economic and market research with Sungard Institutional Brokerage, UBS Warburg, and the Federal Reserve.
Beth Ann holds a PhD in Economics from Columbia University, a Master's in International and Development Economics from Yale University, and a BS in Economics from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania
Heinz-Jürgen Büchner
IKB Deutsche Industriebank AG
Dr Heinz-Jürgen Büchner is Vice President, Economics and Research, at the IKB Deutsche Industriebank AG at Düsseldorf.
He has been with IKB since September 1990. Prior to that, he was with the Landesbank Rheinland-Pfalz at Mainz, and from 1981 to 1987 was an Assistant Professor at the Economics Department of the University of Bonn.
He studied Economics at the University of Bonn, where he received his Ph.D. His dissertation was on “Economic theories of tax evasion”.
Carl Chrappa
Independent Equipment Company
Larry Cottrill
Port of Long Beach
Larry Cottrill has been involved in long range port planning for over twenty years. Since arriving at the Port of Long Beach six years ago, Mr. Cottrill has managed the preparation of long range plans for several large marine terminals. He also directed the preparation of joint studies with the Port of Los Angeles involving the forecast of San Pedro Bay’s container fleet, and container and non-container cargo. Mr. Cottrill is also responsible for maintaining the Port’s economic impact modeling system that he helped develop with Rutgers University’s Center for Urban Policy Research. Prior to joining the Port of Long Beach, Mr. Cottrill worked for the Port of Los Angeles for 15 years, where he served 10 years as the Deputy Director of Planning and Research. In that capacity he was responsible for preparing cargo forecasts and market studies for a number of development projects as well as for the 2020 Plan, the first comprehensive land use plan for San Pedro Bay.
Mr. Cottrill is a charter member of the American Planning Association and has taught city planning classes in the graduate program at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. He received his B.S. degree from Cal Poly with honors and a Master of Urban Planning degree from the University of Washington. Mr. Cottrill is a recent recipient of the Innovative Intermodal Solutions for Urban Transportation Award from the Institute of Transportation Engineers.
David Crane
Special Advisor to Gov Schwarzenegger for Jobs and Economic Growth
Ann Dunbar
Bureau of Economic Analysis
Jerome S. Engel
Lester Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation
Mr. Engel joined the University of California at Berkeley in 1991 to found the Lester Center. He serves as both the Center's Executive Director and the Director of the Haas School's Entrepreneurship Program. He is responsible for the creation of an institution that coordinates all of the university's activities in the areas of entrepreneurship and innovation. Mr. Engel is an adjunct professor at the Haas School in Entrepreneurship and instructs in both the School's MBA and Executive Education programs specializing in Entrepreneurship, New Venture Finance, Corporate Innovation, Venture Capital and Private Equity (see schedule below).
Together with Prof. John Freeman, he developed the Venture Capital Executive Program (VCEP), which is taught through the Haas Center for Executive Development. He is also the faculty co-director of various exec ed programs based on VCEP.
Mr. Engel is also Co-Founder and General Partner of Monitor Ventures, LLC, a venture capital firm organized in collaboration with the Monitor Group, a global strategic consulting and private equity management firm founded by Prof. Michael Porter of Harvard.
From 1979 through 1990, Mr. Engel was the San Francisco Bay Area Director of Entrepreneurial Services for Ernst & Young. Promoted to Partner in 1982, Mr. Engel specialized in consulting on capital formation, corporate strategy and management organization of entrepreneurial ventures, with an emphasis in software and biotechnology. In 1990, Mr. Engel was appointed Ernst & Young's National Director of Capital Resources, where he directed the firms efforts in raising capital for its emerging business clients nationwide. During his career, Mr. Engel helped a number of entrepreneurial firms go public, including AutoDesk and Fair Isaac Companies.
From 1992-1995, Mr. Engel served as a member of the Board of Directors of Maxis Corporation, and oversaw the company's financing activities, which included venture capital and a successful initial public offering. In 1995, Mr. Engel was a founding General Partner of Kline Hawkes Capital, a venture capital firm based in Los Angeles. In 1998, Mr. Engel co-founded AllBusiness.com, which he grew to over 150 employees and successfully sold to NBCi in March 2000.
Current Board Positions include Adaptive Planning, Jupiter Systems, MedAmerica, ElectraScan and the Berkeley Entrepreneurship Laboratory. In addition to Mr. Engel's current positions, he has served on the Boards of a number of emerging companies including MicroNet Technology (recently acquired by Ampex), Transoft Inc., a rapidly growing provider of FiberChannel networking solutions, and Centric Software, a leader in 3-D visualization and virtual product prototyping. Mr. Engel serves as Faculty Co-Chair of the Global Social Venture Competition, The UC Berkeley Business Plan Competition, the International Berkeley-Intel Technology Challenge, on the Faculty Advisory Board of the Kauffman Fellows Program, on the editorial Board of the International Journal of Technoentrepreneurship, and previously served as Faculty Director of the Kauffman Foundation Lifelong Learning for Entrepreneurship Educators Program. He is a CPA and received his undergraduate degree at Penn State and his masters at the Wharton school.
In 2002 Mr. Engel was presented the Edwin M. and Gloria W. Appel Prize by Babson College at the Symposium for Entrepreneurial Education at Babson. The Appel Prize is presented to those individuals who bring "entrepreneurial vitality to academe in true spirit of the Price-Babson College Fellows Program."
Kaye Husbands Fealing
National Science Foundation
Dr. Kaye Husbands Fealing became the Science of Science Policy Advisor in the Directorate of Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences (SBE) in June 2006. For the year prior, Dr. Husbands Fealing was a Program Director in SBE’s Economics program. She also serves as liaison to The Evolution of Cooperation and Trading (TECT) initiative, which is a collaborative effort between NSF and the European Science Foundation. Dr. Husbands Fealing received her Ph.D. in Economics in 1990 at Harvard University, where her fields of study included Industrial Organization, International Trade Theory, Multinational Enterprises, and International Development. In 1981, she received her B.A., with a double major in Mathematics and Economics from the University of Pennsylvania. She currently serves as the William Brough Professor of Economics at Williams College, Williamstown, Massachusetts, where she has taught courses on global competitive strategies, microeconomics, industrial organization, as well as senior seminars on a variety of topics including the Pacific Rim, globalization, income security, privatization, and regulation. She has also been a visiting scholar at Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center for Technology Policy and Industrial Development from July 1992 through August 1996, where she conducted research on NAFTA’s effect on the Mexican and Canadian automotive industries and on strategic alliances between aircraft contractors and their subcontractors. Dr. Husbands Fealing continues to conduct research on the automotive industry and on the effect of multinationals on global technological diversity.
Geza Feketekuty
Monterey Institute of International Studies
Prof. Feketekuty comes to the Monterey Institute with a lifetime career in trade policy and negotiation, having served as a Senior Staff Economist with the Council of Economic Advisors and a budget examiner at the Office of Management and Budget. He taught at Princeton, Cornell and John Hopkins universities.
He came to the Monterey Institute from the Office of the United States Trade Representative, where he provided intellectual leadership in the formulation of US trade policy for over 20 years, and reached the rank of Senior Assistant US Trade Representative. He played key roles in both the Tokyo and Uruguay Rounds of Multilateral Trade Negotiations, and as Chairman of the OECD Trade Committee in the early 1990's he helped to shape the international agenda for future negotiations in the WTO.
His book, International Trade in Services: A Blue Print for Negotiation played a major role in the negotiation of the General Agreement on Trade in Services. Many of his articles on trade policy topics have had a major influence on the development of the global trade agenda over more than two decades.
He is the founder of the graduate program in commercial diplomacy at the Monterey Institute, and is currently helping a number of developing countries to develop similar programs.
He consults on trade policy issues and provides short training courses on commercial diplomacy skills for a number of US government agencies, international organizations and the World Bank and foreign governments. He also runs a nonprofit organization, the International Commercial Diplomacy Project, devoted to the development of training materials in commercial diplomacy.
Martin Fleming
IBM Corporation
Martin Fleming -- an economist and strategist -- is Vice President, Corporate Strategy, IBM Corp.
Martin leads IBM’s Emerging Business Opportunity program, addressing specific areas of industry transformation where incumbent organizations are evolving their businesses and investing accordingly; new players are entering and challenging industry structure; and innovation is crucial for differentiation. Emerging Business Opportunities build on existing IBM capabilities providing points of strategic entry and representing the potential to re-define or elevate IBM’s role in defined market segments.
Previously, Martin led IBM’s Global Sales and Distribution’s strategy and planning activities, a differentiated portfolio process focusing on growth industries, solutions areas, and other emerging growth targets. He also led IBM’s strategy development and implementation for IBM’s global business partner community.
Prior to joining IBM, Martin was a Principal Consultant and the technology practice leader at Abt Associates, Cambridge Massachusetts. He was also Vice President, Strategy for Reed-Elsevier, Inc., the Anglo-Dutch information company. Martin began his professional career at the System Dynamics Group, Alfred P. Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His work has been published in a number of professional journals and other publications such as the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.
Martin holds a Ph.D. and an M.A. in Economics from Tufts University and a B.S. cum laude in Mathematics from Lowell Technological Institute
William F. Ford
Middle Tennessee State University
William F. Ford holds the Weatherford Chair of Finance at Middle Tennessee State University. Previously, he held appointments at the University of Denver and within the banking industry, including president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan.
Tripp Frohlichstein
MediaMasters Inc.
Tripp Frohlichstein founded MediaMasters, Inc. in 1986 after spending more than a decade at KMOX-TV, the then CBS-owned and operated station in St. Louis. During that period, Frohlichstein acted in various newsroom management capacities, culminating with assistant news director.
With MediaMasters, Frohlichstein has traveled throughout the United States, Canada and Europe to train thousands of people in corporations, associations, government and non-profit organizations on how to work with the media, how to handle crises, how to give presentations and how to communicate more effectively.
In addition, Frohlichstein served as a TV news critic for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and for the St. Louis Journalism Review and was an adjunct professor in the Webster University Media Department for twenty years. Frohlichstein also acted as television critic for KMOX-CBS radio from 1987 through early 1996.
Hubert Fromlet
Swedbank
Hubert Fromlet is chief economist at Swedbank, Stockholm, and professor at Blekinge Institute of Technology. He received his MBA and Ph.D. from the University of Wurzburg. Prior to joining Swedbank, he was chief economist at Co-operative Bank, Stockholm and responsible for macro research at the SAAB-SCANIA, Sweden.
Tracy Genessen
Kirkland & Ellis, LLP
Tracy Genesen is a seasoned trial and appellate attorney who is a partner in the San Francisco office of Kirkland. She directs a variety of complex multi-district federal court litigation focusing primarily on constitutional challenges to state alcohol regulatory statutes. Ms. Genesen provides legal guidance to wine industry trade associations and serves as the national spokesperson on the legal and public policy aspects of direct shipping of wine to consumers. She has provided strategic and substantive advice to legal team and wine industry trade associations on direct shipping lawsuits.
Ms. Genesen's experience includes serving as Legal Director for the Coalition for Free Trade and Counsel to Family Winemakers of California. She has directed and coordinated co-counsel and wine industry leaders in the writing of merits and amicus briefs; co-authored amicus briefs for submission to the United States Supreme Court and the Fourth, Fifth and Eleventh Circuit Courts of Appeals; advocated public policy reform before numerous federal and state agencies; provided legal guidance to wine industry trade associations and served as the national spokesperson on the legal and public policy aspects of direct shipping of wine to consumers. She has also represented state governmental agencies in land use and Fair Political Practice Act litigation and handled professional liability and attorney discipline matters.
Ms. Genesen has managed high-volume complex civil litigation cases in the health care and software industries. In addition, she served on a litigation team that successfully defended a corporation in a healthcare fraud prosecution. She has also served as an in-house ethics advisor and has litigated professional liability and attorney discipline matters.
Ms. Genesen served as primary legal and policy advisor to the Chief Trial Counsel with particular emphasis on high profile attorney discipline cases such as the O.J. Simpson criminal lawyers, the lawyers for the Menendez brothers, and the Stephen Yagman matters. She has advocated discipline reform legislation before the California legislature and governmental agencies, taught "Ethics in the Courtroom" to the California judiciary, and acted as the legal spokesperson for the attorney discipline system.
Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas
University of California, Berkeley
Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas grew up in France where he attended Ecole Polytechnique. He received his PhD in 1996 from MIT and taught at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and Princeton University before joining UC Berkeley department of economics.
Professor Gourinchas' main research interests are in international macro-economics and finance. His recent research focuses on the importance of the valuation channel for the dynamics of external adjustment and the determination of exchange rates (with Hélène Rey); on the determinants of capital flows to and from developing countries (with Olivier Jeanne); and on global imbalances (with Ricardo Caballero and Emmanuel Farhi).
Maurine Haver
President
Haver Analytics
Maurine is President and founder of Haver Analytics Inc., an economic consulting and information services company. Prior to starting Haver Analytics in 1978, she was an economist in the economic forecasting group of General Electric in New York, a member of the International Staff of Companie Bull General Electric in Paris and a consultant in the Foreign Currency Exposure Management Group of the Chase Manhattan Bank in London.
Maurine served as President of the National Association of Business Economists (1994-95) and now chairs the NABE campaign for Quality Economic Data that she initiated during her year as president. In her role as Chair of the NABE Statistics Committee, she testifies before Congress on statistical issues, conducts quarterly meetings which bring together producers and users of federal statistics and organizes seminars to help users better understand the statistics available from government and private sources.
Maurine chairs the Business Research Advisory Council of the Bureau of Labor Statistics and is a member of the Advisory Committee of the Bureau of Economic Analysis. She has served as secretary of the Forecasters Club of New York since 1992. She is a past president of the New York Association for Business Economics (1989-90), the Downtown Economists Club (1993-94) and the Money Marketeers of New York University (1998-99). She chaired the board of the Council of Professional Associations on Federal Statistics (COPAFS) during 2001-2003. She currently serves on the board of Mutual of America and is a member of the American Economic Association, the American Statistical Association and the National Economists Club.
Maurine holds a B.S. in Economics and Mathematics from Michigan State University, an M.B.A. from the Stern School of New York University and completed her oral exam for a PhD in International Economics at NYU.
Nayantara Hensel
U.S. Naval Postgraduate School
Dr. Nayantara Hensel is an Assistant Professor of Economics and Finance at the Graduate School of Business and Public Policy at the US Naval Postgraduate School. She has had an extensive background in finance, industrial organization, antitrust, mergers and acquisitions, and corporate strategy.Dr. Hensel’s recent research has examined the impact of size and market structure on efficiency (economies of scale) in European and Japanese banks and on their tendency to open branches or merge, the degree to which mergers in the defense sector and the railroad sector led to efficiency relative to market power, and the impact of online auctions on IPO pricing efficiency. She has published in a variety of journals, including the Review of Financial Economics, the International Journal of Managerial Finance, the European Financial Management Journal, the Journal of Financial Transformation, Business Economics, and Harvard Business School Working Knowledge. She has given a number of seminars at institutions, including the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, London Business School, RAND, and Harvard University
Dr. Hensel received her B.A (magna cum laude) from Harvard University where she was a member of Phi Beta Kappa. She received her M. A. and Ph.D. in Business Economics (Applied Economics) also from Harvard University. Prior to joining the faculty at the US Naval Postgraduate School, Dr. Hensel served as a Senior Manager at Ernst & Young, LLP and the chief economist for one of its units, was a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research, taught at Harvard University and the Stern School of Business at NYU, and was an economist at NERA (part of Marsh & McLennan).
Devon Herrick
Senior Fellow, National Center for Policy Analysis
Chair, NABE Health Economics Roundtable
Devon Herrick, Ph. D., concentrates on health care issues, such as Internet-based medicine, health insurance and the uninsured, as well as pharmaceutical drug issues. Other areas which Dr. Herrick focuses on include managed care, patient empowerment, medical privacy and technology-related issues.
Dr. Herrick has been responsible for the NCPA's computer and information services, as well as oversight of the design and maintenance of the NCPA's award-winning Web site - Idea House. He has training in financial analysis and health economics, and has conducted several major research projects for the NCPA, having published several research studies and papers on health policy. Herrick is a sought-after speaker on health policy issues.
Prior to joining the NCPA, Dr. Herrick was a research assistant at the Bruton Center for Development Studies at the University of Texas at Dallas. The Bruton Center integrates geographic information systems, spatial analysis, and exploratory data analysis in the social sciences, applying research on trends, forces, and public policy. In addition, he spent six years working in health care accounting and financial management for a Dallas-area health care system.
Dr. Herrick received a Ph.D. in Political Economy and a Master of Public Affairs from the University of Texas at Dallas with a concentration in economic development. Dr. Herrick's dissertation research examined patient empowerment through empirical analysis of the Internet and disease advocacy.
He also holds an MBA with a concentration in finance from Oklahoma City University and an MBA from Amber University, as well as a BS in accounting from the University of Central Oklahoma.
Andrew Hodge
Bureau of Economics Analysis
Andrew is responsible for the development and improvement of profits reporting at the US Bureau of Economic Analysis, and liaison with user groups. He also acts as senior advisor on the overall US economic NIPA accounts.
Prior experience includes Group Managing Director, Global Insight, in charge of the US forecast, Bank Brussels Lambert, VP, Economist and Strategist, doing global economics/market strategy, including US and G-7 central bank watching , and Bankers Trust, VP and Economist, where responsibilities included Europe/Mideast/Africa and foreign exchange. Before joining Bankers Trust, Andrew held senior positions in economics with W.R. Grace, J.P. Morgan, and the US Treasury. The latter included service at the US Embassy, Paris, the Foreign Exchange Dept. and staff work preparing for the Smithsonian Agreement. He holds a B.A. in Economics from the University of Michigan and an M.A. in Economics from George Washington University
Offices and activities include Money Marketeers of NY, past governor, International Economists of NY, Past President, and NABE. Regular contributor to CNBC, CNN, WSJ, Financial Times, Le Monde, and other media. He has written extensively on corporate profits, US macroeconomic forecasting, venture capital, global central banking, emerging market country risk, the international monetary system and foreign exchange markets
Jim Hosek
RAND
Jim Hosek is Director of the Forces and Resources Policy Center in the National Defense Research Institute at RAND and an expert on defense manpower. His current work concerns the reform of military compensation and retirement benefits, the effect of deployment on the retention of service members, the supply of recruits to the reserves, and the competitiveness of U.S. science and technology and the adequacy of the supply of scientists and engineers. He is Editor-in-Chief of The RAND Journal of Economics, a leading journal on industrial organization, regulation, and contracts, and professor of economics at the Pardee RAND Graduate School where he teaches game theory. He has served as RAND Corporate Research Manager in Human Capital, Chair of the Economics and Statistics Department, and Chair of the Economic Advisory Council of the California Institute, a nonprofit organization informing California's congressional delegation on policy matters. Jim earned his B.A. in English from Cornell University and his M.A. and Ph.D. in Economics from The University of Chicago.
Gene Huang
FedEx Corporation
Gene Huang is Chief Economist for FedEx and a Managing Director of the company’s Economic and Industry Analysis Group. He is responsible for forecasting global economic and financial conditions. Gene tracks and monitors all industries served by FedEx.
Gene is a member of the Blue Chip Consensus Panel, which provides the economic consensus used by policy makers as well as the business community, the Wall Street Journal Economic Panel and BusinessWeek Magazine’s Business Outlook Panel. In 2002, Gene was profiled in BusinessWeek as its“Most Accurate Forecaster”. He credits his forecasting success to the “front row seat” that FedEx provides him in global Supply Chain Management. Gene is a member of the Board of Directors of the National Association for Business Economics (NABE).
Gene began his corporate career in 1987 with a Wall Street money management firm. Since then he has worked for some of the largest industrial corporations and most prestigious research institutions in the U.S. and Japan, including Eaton Corporation, General Motors Corporation, ICSEAD in Japan, and Wharton School’s Economic Research Unit.
Gene received his M.A. from Yale University and his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. He also holds a law degree from Fudan University in Shanghai.
He is the author of two books in business economics and many articles published in U.S., Japanese, and European economic and policy journals. Gene is frequently interviewed by leading news journals in the U.S. and has made appearances on Bloomberg TV as an economic commentator. He has also occasionally served in an advisory capacity to U.S. Federal Government agencies and international organizations.
Ellen Hughes-Cromwick
Ford Motor Company
Ellen Hughes-Cromwick is a director and chief economist at Ford Motor Company. She joined Ford in 1996, and now directs the corporate economics group with major responsibility for the company’s global economic and automotive industry forecasts. Prior to joining Ford, she was a senior economist at Mellon Bank from 1990 to 1996, and assistant professor of economics at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, during the late 1980s. She served for two years as a staff economist on the President’s Council of Economic Advisers during the Reagan Administration. She received her bachelor’s degree from the University of Notre Dame, a master’s degree in international development, and a PhD in economics at Clark University in Massachusetts. She was recently appointed to the Congressional Budget Office Panel of Economic Advisers.
For the last four consecutive years, Ellen has served as co-chair of NABE’s Annual March Policy Conference held in Washington, DC.
Barbara Insel
MKF Research LLC
Barbara joined MKF Research as Managing Director in 2004, having spent more than twenty years in international investment research and strategy, with senior positions at such firms as Salomon Brothers, Morgan Stanley Asset Management and Kleinwort Benson. Throughout her career, Barbara has been involved in wine-related investments and transactions from Latin America though Eastern Europe. Originally from New York, she lived and worked there, London, Prague and Moscow along with much of Latin America and Asia. She was one of the founders of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, created to rebuild Eastern Europe and Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union.
Sara Johnson
Global Insight
Sara Johnson is Managing Director of Global Macroeconomics where she is responsible for advising clients on worldwide business opportunities and risks. She is also Chief Economist for the Consumer Markets practice, which forecasts and interprets economic and demographic trends affecting retailers, consumer products companies, and financial institutions. Her areas of expertise include the U.S. and global economic outlooks, consumer spending and finances, exchange rates and interest rates, economic impacts of oil prices and the global construction industry outlook. She holds degrees in economics from Wellesley College and Harvard University.
Robert Kanter
Port of Long Beach
With more than 30 years of experience, Dr. Robert G. Kanter is the Managing Director of Environmental Affairs and Planning for the Port of Long Beach. As director, Dr. Kanter guides the port’s environmental, transportation, and master land use planning divisions. He coordinates short- and long-range land-use planning with an eye toward forecasted commodity trends in international trade and commerce.
Dr. Kanter’s responsibilities include development of policies and plans for truck, rail, and transportation infrastructure improvements that are required to meet the demands created by increasing international trade. He is also responsible for developing port environmental policies, ensuring that the port is in compliance with existing environmental regulations, and planning for future requirements.
Robert Kleinhenz
California Association of Realtors
Robert Kleinhenz is the Deputy Chief Economist for the California Association of REALTORSâ, a statewide trade organization of real estate professionals with 185,000 members. Robert manages C.A.R.’s research and economics department, which gathers and publishes information on the California housing market, and conducts survey research of consumers and C.A.R. members. He is a frequent contributor to media coverage on the housing market and economy.
Dr. Kleinhenz has over twenty years of experience in the field of Regional Economics. He holds a Bachelor’s degree from the University of Michigan, a Master’s degree and a Doctorate from the University of Southern California, all in Economics. Prior to working at C.A.R, he taught Economics for over 15 years, most recently at California State University, Fullerton. He has spoken to local, state, and national audiences and is a frequent contributor to media coverage on the housing market and economy.
Dr. Kleinhenz is a member of the NABE, a member of the NABE Regional Utility Roundtable, and the 2007-2008 President of the Los Angeles chapter of NABE.
Rakesh Kochhar
Pew Hispanic Center
Rakesh Kochhar is Associate Director for Research at the Pew Hispanic Center. Dr. Kochhar’s work at the Center focuses on trends in the employment, income and wealth of Hispanic workers and households. He has served as President of the Society of Government Economists and as an International Economics Fellow of the Ford Foundation. Dr. Kochhar received his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees from the University of Delhi, India and completed his doctoral studies in economics at Brown University.
Jürgen Kröger
European Commission
Edward Lazear
Council of Economic Advisers
Edward P. Lazear was confirmed by the Senate on February 17 and sworn in as Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers on Monday, February 27, 2006. Before coming to the Council of Economic Advisers, he was a member of President Bush’s Advisory Panel on Tax Reform.
Lazear is on leave of absence from Stanford University where he is the Jack Steele Parker Professor of Human Resources Management and Economics (1995) and the Morris Arnold Cox Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. He taught previously at the University of Chicago’s Graduate School of Business. He is also an elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2000), the Econometric Society, and the Society of Labor Economists. He is on leave as a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research and was a member of the National Academy of Sciences Board on Testing and Assessment. Lazear was the first vice-president and president of the Society of Labor Economists, as well as the founding editor of the Journal of Labor Economics and founder of two companies.
Lazear developed research and ideas that became the seminal work in the area of “personnel economics,” a field that married economics and statistics to organizational behavior. He has written or edited nine books.
Among his more than one hundred published papers, the following are of special note: “Speeding, Terrorism, and Teaching to the Test” Quarterly Journal of Economics (2006); “The Peter Principle: A Theory of Decline,” Journal of Political Economy (2004); “Economic Imperialism,” for the millennium issue of the Quarterly Journal of Economics (2000); “Culture and Language,” Journal of Political Economy (12/99); “Educational Production,” Quarterly Journal of Economics (2001); “Performance, Pay and Productivity,” American Economic Review (12/00); “Peer Pressure and Partnerships,” with Eugene Kane, Journal of Political Economy (8/92); “Labor Economics and the Psychology of Organization,” Journal of Economic Perspectives (Spring 1991); “Job Security Provisions and Employment,” Quarterly Journal of Economics (8/90); “Pay Equality and Industrial Politics,” Journal of Political Economy (6/89); “Salaries and Piece Rates,” Journal of Business (7/86); “Retail Pricing and Clearance Sales,” American Economic Review (3/86); “Rank-Order Tournaments as Optimum Labor Contracts,” with Sherwin Rosen, Journal of Political Economy (10/81); “Why is There Mandatory Retirement?” Journal of Political Economy (12/79); “Personnel Economics: Past Lessons and Future Direction,” Presidential Address to the Society of Labor Economists, Journal of Labor Economics (1999); and “Globalization and the Market for Teammates,”; Frank Paish Memorial Lecture to the Royal Economic Society, Warwick, England, Economic Journal (1999).
Lazear’s many academic prizes and awards include the 1998 Leo Melamed Biennial Prize for outstanding research, the 2003 Adam Smith Prize from the European Association of Labor Economists, the IZA Prize in Labor Economics from the Institute for the Study of Labor, Bonn, the Distinguished Teaching Award from Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business in 1994, and the Distinguished Service Award from Stanford University in 2002. He has an honorary doctorate from Albertson College of Idaho and delivered the 2002 UCLA Commencement Address.
Lazear has advised many governments throughout the world including Russia, Romania, Republic of Georgia and Ukraine and recently was a member of Governor Schwarzenegger’s Council of Economic Advisers.
Born in 1948, Professor Lazear grew up in Los Altos, California. He received his A.B. and A. M. degrees from the University of California at Los Angeles and his Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University. He is married and has one daughter.
Jeremy A. Leonard
Manufacturers Alliance/MAPI
Stuart Mackintosh
Group of 30
Stuart P. M. Mackintosh is the Executive Director of the Group of Thirty (G30). The G30 is a nonprofit, an international body composed of very senior representatives of the private and public sectors and academia. It aims to deepen understanding of international economic and financial issues, to explore the international repercussions of decisions taken in the public and private sectors, and to examine the choices available to market practitioners and policymakers. Mr. Mackintosh oversees all aspects of the G30 annual work program, its development and fundraising.
Previously Mr. Mackintosh was a Washington-based economist and country risk manager for Mitsubishi International Corporation. In that role he initiated a weekly U.S. economic forecast and commentary for senior executives. Other responsibilities included conducting country risk analyses of Central Asian states and Russia. Before locating to the U.S., Mr. Mackintosh was Chief of Staff and principal speechwriter for leading politicians in the European Parliament.
Mr. Mackintosh is Chairman of the Board of the National Economists Club, a 500 member chapter of the National Association for Business Economics. He is a Director of International Roundtable of NABE. Mr. Mackintosh has as B.A. from University of Newcastle upon Tyne and a M.Sc. from the University of Edinburgh.
Catherine L. Mann
Brandeis University
Peterson Institute for International Economics
Catherine L. Mann is a professor at the International Business School at Brandeis University, where her specialties include Empirical International Trade And Exchange Rates, Globalization Of Information Technology And Venture Capital, and Information Technology And Development
She has also been a senior fellow at the Institute for International Economics since 1997. Previously, she served as assistant director of the International Finance Division at the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, senior international economist on the President's Council of Economic Advisers at the White House, and adviser to the chief economist at the World Bank.
She is author or coauthor of two books that focus on the policy foundations for effective use of technology for domestic development and external competitiveness. APEC and the New Economy (2002) was presented to and endorsed by APEC Leaders at their meeting in Shanghai, China. Global Electronic Commerce: A Policy Primer (2000) uses general analysis and specific examples from field research in more than 10 countries to address how the Internet and electronic commerce affect policymaking, with particular focus on infrastructure and policy issues of taxation, privacy, security, intellectual property, and trade negotiations. In addition she directs a project funded by the Ford Foundation to support collaborative research comparing Asian and Latin American countries on how technology affects entrepreneurship, government, education and skills, and financial intermediation. She has delivered keynote speeches and engaged in projects on technology and policy in China, Thailand, Vietnam, Taiwan, Sri Lanka, Mexico, Morocco, Tunisia, South Africa, as well as in Australia, Canada, Finland, Germany, and New Zealand.
She also studies broader issues of US trade, the sustainability of the current account, and the exchange value of the dollar. Published in 1999, Is the US Trade Deficit Sustainable? answers perennial questions about the impact of global integration on the US economy and the dollar. A Journal of Economic Perspectives (2002) article reviews concepts of sustainability, including the role of international financial markets and international trade in services, topics also addressed in "How Long the Strong Dollar?" in Dollar Overvaluation and the World Economy, edited by John Williamson and C. Fred Bergsten, and in "The US Current Account, New Economy Services, and Implications for Sustainability" in the Review of International Economics.
She received her PhD in Economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her undergraduate degree is from Harvard University.
Francois Melese
Defense Resource Management Institute
Dr. Melese earned his Bachelors degree in Economics at U.C. Berkeley, his Masters degree at the University of British Columbia in Canada, and his Doctorate at the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium. He was a research fellow at the Institut de Recherches Economiques et Sociales (IRES) and the Center for Operations Research and Econometrics (CORE) in Belgium before joining Auburn University’s Business School in 1982. In 1987 he joined the faculty of the Naval Postgraduate School and today is Professor of Economics at the Defense Resources Management Institute (DRMI). Besides teaching resident executive management courses for domestic and international government executives, he has taught short courses in over two dozen countries on public budgeting and defense management. He has consulted extensively, most recently for the Joint Chiefs of Staff and for the Deputy Secretary of Defense’s Directorate for Organizational & Management Planning.
Dr. Melese has published over 50 articles and book chapters on a variety of topics in economics and management including: energy markets, labor & incentive systems, international trade, economic development, applied game theory, defense management, and public budgeting. At the request of NATO Headquarters and the State Department, he has represented the United States as an expert in defense management and public budgeting at NATO meetings in: Budapest, Hungary; Kyiv, Ukraine; Berlin, Germany; Garmisch, Germany; Yerevan, Armenia, and will be representing the U.S. at the upcoming joint NATO/Marshall Center meetings in Ljubljana, Slovenia. His talk to the NABE will be based on a publication co-authored with Professor Jim Blandin and the Honorable Sean O’Keefe entitled “A New Management Model for Government: Integrating Activity-Based Costing, the Balanced Scorecard and Total Quality Management with the Planning, Programming and Budgeting System” (International Public Management Review, Vol. 5, No. 2, 2004) The paper can be downloaded at: www.ipmr.net.
Robert Murray
McGraw-Hill Construction
Robert Murray is vice president of economic affairs for McGraw-Hill Construction, the leading source of project news, product information, industry analysis and editorial coverage for design and construction professionals.
Murray joined McGraw-Hill Construction in 1980 as an economist, with a primary focus on analyzing construction industry trends. In the mid-1980s he directed a team of economists that developed the Construction Market Forecasting Service, providing five-year projections for 22 building types by nine regions of the U.S. This product has subsequently become the pre-eminent forecast of the nation's construction industry, and it serves as the foundation for other construction and real estate forecast products offered by McGraw-Hill Construction Research and Analytics.
Murray is the author of the McGraw-Hill Construction Outlook, and also coordinates the five-year industry forecast and the Construction Market Forecasting Service, which analyzes national and regional trends for building products. He received his bachelor's degree from Princeton University, and holds both an M.B.A. and a Master 's degree in economics from Columbia University.
Michael Niemira
National Council of Shopping Centers
MICHAEL P. NIEMIRA is the Chief Economist and Director of Research for the International Council of Shopping Centers (ICSC). Before joining ICSC, he held the position of Vice President and Senior Economist for Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi, Ltd. (BTM) in New York, where he worked in the Research Department. Previously, he worked for PaineWebber, Chemical Bank and Merrill Lynch. Over the years, he was an adjunct instructor at New York University’s Stern Graduate School of Business and at the New York Institute of Finance.
He produces the ICSC-UBS Weekly Chain Store Sales Snapshot – a retail sales monitor – as well as the monthly report ICSC Chain Store Sales Trends. Mr. Niemira has co-authored two books: Forecasting Financial and Economic Cycles, John Wiley & Sons, 1994, and Trading the Fundamentals, Revised Edition, McGraw Hill, 1998. Additionally, he contributed numerous articles to books, journals and magazines, including writing a monthly magazine column about the consumer for the trade publication Chain Store Age.
Mr. Niemira is on advisory panels for the Conference Board and the Institute for Supply Management.
He has received the A.G. Abramson award from the National Association for Business Economics and was awarded honorary faculty membership by St. John’s University chapter of Omicron Delta Epsilon.
Maurice Obstfeld
University of California at Berkeley
John Odell
University of Southern California
John Odell completed a Ph.D. in political science in 1976 at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He was a member of Harvard University’s faculty from 1976 through 1982. Since 1982 he has taught and written at the University of Southern California, where he is Professor of International Relations today. From 1989 to 1992, Odell directed USC’s Center for International Studies. From 1992 through 1996 he served as Editor of International Organization, regarded by many as the leading scholarly journal of international relations in the world.
His research and teaching have concentrated on the governance of the world economy--why governments and international organizations do what they do in international economic relations. He has conducted field research in Europe, Asia, and Latin America as well as the United States, in order to learn directly from the diplomats he writes about. He has spent a year working as a visiting fellow in the office of the US Trade Representative, the top US trade negotiator. Six institutions have awarded him grants or fellowships, and institutions in many countries have invited him to lecture.
He has written extensively about negotiations among states on issues such as trade, exchange rates and debt. In 2000 he published Negotiating the World Economy and in 2006, Negotiating Trade: Developing Countries in the WTO and NAFTA. His most recent research has concentrated on negotiations in the World Trade Organization, which takes him to Geneva frequently. He also manages a virtual network of researchers writing about the process of international economic negotiation, found at www.usc.edu/enn. He has served as a consultant to the World Bank, the U.S. Department of State, the Ford Foundation, the Asia Foundation, and the Council of the Americas. In Mexico he helped train diplomats for effective economic negotiation. Personal Web site: www-rcf.usc.edu/~odell.
Sumiye Okubo
Bureau of Economic Analysis
Sue Okubo joined the Bureau of Economic Analysis in June 1997 as Associate Director of Industry Economics. She oversees the preparation and analysis of the input-output accounts of the U.S. economy, gross product originating accounts, and supplementary industry satellite accounts including the Travel and Tourism Satellite Account and the R&D Satellite Account.
Prior to joining BEA, Dr. Okubo was Director of the Office of International Macroeconomic Analysis, Office of the Chief Economist, U.S. Department of Commerce and served an Assistant National Intelligence Officer for Economics at the National Intelligence Council. Her private sector experience includes serving as Manager, R&D Strategy Analysis, GTE Laboratories, 1980-1982, and from 1978-1979, as economist at General Electric Corporate Research and Development. Dr. Okubo received a Ph.D. in economics from Tulane University.
Pia M. Orrenius
Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas
Pia Orrenius is a senior economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. As a labor economist and member of the regional group, she analyzes the regional economy, with special focus on the border region. Orrenius’s research also focuses on the causes and consequences of Mexico–U.S. migration, illegal immigration, and U.S. immigration policy. Orrenius spent the 2004–2005 academic year as senior economist on the Council of Economic Advisers in the Executive Office of the President, Washington D.C., where she advised the Bush administration on labor, health and immigration issues.
Orrenius is affiliated with several academic institutions. She is a Tower Center Fellow at the Tower Center for Political Studies at Southern Methodist University and a Research Fellow at the IZA Institute of Labor in Bonn, Germany. She holds a Ph.D. in economics from the University of California at Los Angeles and bachelor degrees in economics and Spanish from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign.
Stephen Parente
University of Minnesota
Stephen Parente, associate professor in finance at the Carlson School of Management, studies the health care delivery system. He is especially interested in consumer-directed health plans.
"Consumer-directed health plans are the wave of the future and have the potential to drastically cut health insurance costs and reduce the number of uninsured," Parente explains.
In his current research, Parente is studying consumer-directed health plans, including health savings accounts (HSAs). In a new study recently published in Health Affairs, Parente looks at simulated adoption rates of HSAs in the wake of the Bush administration's refundable tax-credit proposals.
Parente is deputy director of the Carlson School's Medical Industry Leadership Initiative, which provides cutting-edge management research and leadership education for the health care supply chain.
Parente also holds joint appointments in the doctoral program in health services research at the School of Public Health and in the health informatics graduate program at the School of Medicine, both at the University of Minnesota.
He teaches graduate-level courses in health information technology, health economics, and medical technology evaluation.
Wesley Phoa
Capital Guardian Trust
Wesley Phoa is a vice president of Capital Strategy Research, Inc. and manages U.S. Fixed Income portfolios. He is also an investment analyst covering U.S. Government bonds, as well as having responsibilities for Fixed-Income quantitative research.
Prior to joining Capital Strategy Research in 1999, he was with Capital Management Sciences in Los Angeles for three years, where he served as vice president and later as director of research. Before that he spent three years with Deutsche Bank in Australia as a quantitative analyst and three years as a mathematics lecturer and research fellow.
Dr. Phoa received a PhD in pure mathematics from Trinity College at the University of Cambridge. He also holds a BSc (Honors) from the Australian National University and is based in West Los Angeles.
Robert Poole
Reason Foundation
Robert Poole is director of transportation studies at Reason Foundation, a free market think tank he founded. Poole, an MIT-trained engineer, has advised the last four presidential administrations on transportation and policy issues.
Surface Transportation
In the field of surface transportation, Poole has advised the Federal Highway Administration, the Federal Transit Administration, the White House Office of Policy Development, National Economic Council, Government Accountability Office, and state DOTs in numerous states.
Poole's 1988 policy paper proposing privately financed toll lanes to relieve congestion directly inspired California's landmark private tollway law (AB 680), which authorized four pilot toll projects including the successful 91 Express Lanes in Orange County. More than 20 other states and the federal government have since enacted similar public-private partnership legislation. In 1993, Poole oversaw a study that coined the term HOT (high-occupancy toll) Lanes, a term which has become widely accepted since.
California Gov. Pete Wilson appointed Poole to the California's Commission on Transportation Investment and he also served on the Caltrans Privatization Advisory Steering Committee, where he helped oversee the implementation of AB 680. Poole has also served on transportation advisory bodies to the California Air Resources Board and the Southern California Association of Governments, including SCAG's REACH task force on highway pricing measures. He is a member of the Los Angeles Economic Development Corporation’s Critical Infrastructure Council, an advisor to the American Legislative Exchange Council's Trade & Transportation Task Force, and a member of the board of the Public-Private Ventures division of American Road and Transportation Builders Association. From 2003 to 2005, he was a member of the Transportation Research Board’s special committee on the long-term viability of the fuel tax for highway finance.
Aviation
Poole is a member of the Government Accountability Office's National Aviation Studies Advisory Panel and he has testified before the House and Senate's aviation subcommittees on numerous occasions. Following the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Poole consulted the White House Domestic Policy Council and several members of Congress on ways to improve the nation's airport security.
He has also advised the Federal Aviation Administration, Office of the Secretary of Transportation, White House Office of Policy Development, National Performance Review, National Economic Council, and the National Civil Aviation Review Commission on aviation issues. Poole is a member of the Critical Infrastructure Council of the Los Angeles Economic Development Corporation and of the Air Traffic Control Association.
Poole was among the first to propose the commercialization of the U.S. air traffic control system, and his work in this field has helped shape proposals for a U.S. air traffic control corporation. A version of his corporation concept was implemented in Canada in 1996 and was more recently endorsed by several former top FAA administrators.
Poole's studies also launched a national debate on airport privatization in the United States. He advised both the FAA and local officials during the 1989-90 controversy over the proposed privatization of Albany (NY) Airport. His policy research on this issue helped inspire Congress' 1996 enactment of the Airport Privatization Pilot Program and the privatization of Indianapolis' airport management under Mayor Steve Goldsmith.
General Background
Robert Poole founded the Reason Foundation in 1978, and served as its president and CEO from then until the end of 2000. He was a member of the Bush-Cheney transition team in 2000. Over the years, he has advised the Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Clinton, and George W. Bush administrations on privatization and transportation policy.
Poole is credited as the first person to use the term "privatization" to refer to the contracting-out of public services and is the author of the first-ever book on privatization, Cutting Back City Hall, published by Universe Books in 1980. He is also editor of the books Instead of Regulation: Alternatives to Federal Regulatory Agencies (Lexington Books, 1981), Defending a Free Society (Lexington Books, 1984), and Unnatural Monopolies (Lexington Books, 1985). He also co-edited the book Free Minds & Free Markets: 25 Years of Reason (Pacific Research Institute, 1993).
Lynn Reaser
Bank of America Investment Strategies Group
Lynn Reaser, Ph.D., is chief economist and managing director for the Investment Strategies Group at Bank of America. This group currently manages investments of around $440 billion on behalf of individual and institutional clients of the Wealth and Investment Management Group.
In her current role, Dr. Reaser is responsible for tracking and forecasting economic trends and evaluating their effects on financial markets. She follows international, national, and regional developments, and plays a key role in helping shape the bank’s investment strategy. She is thus an advisor to both the Private Bank, which offers a full range of financial services to high-net-worth individuals and families, and other units of Wealth Investment Management, which furnishes retail brokerage services throughout the country.
Dr. Reaser conducts about 500 interviews a year with newspapers, magazines, radio, and television stations located in the United States and other parts of the world. She also has served in a number of government advisory positions. In addition, she has consulted with Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan and the Board of Governors in her role as chair of the American Bankers Association’s Economic Advisory Council.
Dr. Reaser, who was born in Los Angeles, holds a doctorate, a master's and a bachelor's degree in economics from the University of California at Los Angeles.
Brooks Robinson
Institute for Triple Helix Innovation
University of Hawaii
Dr. Brooks Robinson served as an economist with the U.S. Department of Commerce (USDOC) for nearly two decades. He was chief of the Government Division of the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA), directing over 30 economists in measuring federal and state and local government economic activity. In addition, he served as Chief of BEA’s Income Branch, directing the preparation of income measures for the U.S. economy. During his early years at BEA, he served as an expert on national investment in structures and on construction prices. He also spent two years of his USDOC career as Director of Market Research for the U.S. & Foreign Commercial Service (US&FCS) in New Delhi, India. The US&FCS facilitates international market access for U.S. businesses. During his second year in New Delhi, he also served as Acting Country Director for the U.S.-Asia Environmental Partnership (US-AEP). A collaborative effort between the USDOC and the U.S. Agency for International Development, US-AEP develops opportunities for U.S. firms to introduce environmental products and services into Asia.
As a member of the USDOC staff, Dr. Robinson represented the U.S. on an International Task Force on the Harmonization of Public Sector Accounting, which provided recommendations for improvements to a revised System of National Accounts, which is scheduled to be released in 2008. He also represented BEA on federal interagency committees on alternative measures of material well-being and on preparing the Construction Major Group for the 1997 North American Industrial Classification System.
Dr. Robinson has prepared scholarly articles, papers, and commentaries on a range of topics. He brings to the institute expertise in analyzing and measuring economic efficiencies, which will be used to explore the efficiency-enhancing properties of triple-helix innovation.
Harvey Rosenblum
Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas
Harvey Rosenblum is executive vice president and director of research at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. In this capacity, he serves as economic policy advisor to the Bank's president and as an associate economist for the Federal Open Market Committee, which formulates the nation's monetary policy.
Rosenblum is also a past president and a member of the Executive Committee of the Board of Directors of the National Association for Business Economics (NABE), a prestigious trade association whose 3,000 members are the leading business economists in the United States and many other countries. Past presidents of NABE include several Federal Reserve presidents as well as former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan. Rosenblum is currently serving as Executive Director of the North American Economics and Finance Association. He also is a member of the Product Development and Small Business Incubator Board, appointed by the governor of Texas.
A widely recognized expert on both the national and Texas economies, Rosenblum has written articles for such publications as The Journal of Finance, New York Times, Southwest Economy and The Handbook of Banking Strategy.
Active in economic education, Rosenblum is a visiting professor of finance at Southern Methodist University, teaching courses in contemporary issues on monetary policy and financial institutions and markets.
Rosenblum received a B.A. in economics from the University of Connecticut in 1965 and a Ph.D. in economics from the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 1972.
He began his career with the Federal Reserve in 1970 as an economist with the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, advancing through the ranks to vice president and associate director of research in 1983. He was also a visiting professor of finance with DePaul University from 1973 until 1985. He joined the Dallas Fed as senior vice president and director of research in 1985 and was promoted to executive vice president in 2005.
His current research interests focus on monetary policy, inflation and the growing impact of globalization on the U.S. economy and businesses.
Diego Saltes
American Road and Transportation Builders Association
Saltes has more than a decade of economic analysis and research expertise gained with top industry groups and trade associations. Saltes’s previous research has focused on the transportation, energy and construction markets, as well as macroeconomic analysis and forecasting. As a member of the ARTBA Economics & Research team, he helps develop analyses and reports for industry professionals, members of Congress and their staffs, and federal agency officials that detail the impacts of transportation investment on the U.S. economy.
Saltes joined ARTBA from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, where he served as an economist providing macroeconomic research, analysis and forecasting. He contributed to key congressional testimony on economic trends and also supported legislative proposals dealing with immigration and labor through extensive research on wages and employment. He was a regular contributor to the monthly U.S. Chamber publication, “Economics 101.”
Previously, Saltes directed market research and economic analysis for the American Institute of Architects. He developed economic models for establishing statistical relationships differentiating architecture services from overall construction spending. Saltes began his career with the American Trucking Associations, where he performed extensive research on trucking industry indicators and became a key spokesperson and lead analyst on energy market issues.
Saltes graduated cum laude with a bachelor’s degree in economics and obtained a master’s degree in international economics, both from Radford University. He is currently completing a master’s degree in International Public Policy from the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, D.C.
Saltes, a native of Caracas, Venezuela, is fluent in Spanish and English and is conversational in French. He resides in Arlington, Va.
Joachim Scheide
The Kiel Institute for the World Economy
Joachim Scheide has been the head of the Business Cycle Department of the Kiel Institute for World Economics since February 1999. He represents the Kiel Institute at the joint economic forecast of the six leading research institutes in Germany which is presented to the public twice a year. His main research areas are the analysis and the forecast of the world economy, in particular the US, Euroland and Germany, the role of monetary policy for output and inflation, and issues of national and international macroeconomic policy in general. Furthermore, he has been teaching at the University of Kiel and was a Visiting Professor at the University of Western Ontario in Canada for one year.
Brad Setzer
Roubini Global Economics
Brad Setser is the Senior Economist at RGE Monitor and plays an essential role in guiding its coverage and analysis. Brad served at the U.S. Treasury Department from 1997 to 2001, where he ultimately became the acting director of the Office of International Monetary and Financial Policy. Subsequently as a visiting scholar at the IMF, Dr. Setser worked on the IMF's proposals to improve the sovereign debt restructuring process and helped to explore the implications of balance sheet analysis for crisis prevention and crisis resolution.
Dr. Setser has most recently been an international affairs fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, where his views on sovereign debt, currency reform and the financing of Iraq's reconstruction were frequently quoted in the press. He also co-authored Bailouts or Bail-ins? Responding to Financial Crises in Emerging Economies (Institute for International Economics: 2004) with Professor Roubini. Dr. Setser has a master and doctorate from Oxford, a DEA (Masters) from Sciences-PO, Paris and an undergraduate degree from Harvard University.
Kenneth D. Simonson
Associated General Contractors of America
Ken Simonson joined AGC of America on September 10, 2001. Ever since Day Two he has been provided insight into what was happening to the economy and what it implied for construction and related industries.
Ken’s weekly one-page email newsletter for AGC, The Data DIGest, provides 6000 readers with the latest economic news relevant to construction. He also sends out a variety of state-specific and tax news. He is interviewed and quoted almost daily by local and national media, including The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Business Week, and CNBC. In addition, he has written eight booklets explaining tax provisions in plain English, and he contributes frequently to a variety of business and professional publications and conferences, including columns for Fleet Owner, a trucking magazine, and The Electrical Distributor.
Ken has 30 years of experience analyzing, advocating and communicating about economic and tax issues. Before joining AGC, he was senior economic advisor in the U.S. Small Business Administration’s Office of Advocacy and 13 years. Earlier, he was vice president and chief economist for the American Trucking Associations. He also worked with the President’s Commission on Industrial Competitiveness, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Federal Home Loan Bank Board, and an economic consulting firm.
Ken is a board member of the National Association for Business Economics (NABE) and author of “Digging into Construction Data,” published in NABE’s journal, Business Economics. Since 1982, he has co-chaired the Tax Economists Forum, a professional meeting group he co-founded for leading researchers and policy makers among tax economists. He is vice president of Community Tax Aid, an organization that prepares returns for free for low-income taxpayers. He was one of the principal subjects of The Lobbyists, a bestseller by Jeffrey Birnbaum, now a writer for the Washington Post.
Ken has a BA in economics from the University of Chicago, an MA in economics from Northwestern University, and he has taken advanced graduate economics courses at the Universite de Paris, Johns Hopkins University and Georgetown University.
John Silvia
Chief Economist
Wachovia Bank N.A.
Dr. John Silvia joined Wachovia in February 2002 as chief economist for the Bank. Previously, John worked on Capitol Hill as senior economist for the U.S. Senate Joint Economic Committee and chief economist for the U.S. Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee. Prior to that, he was chief economist of Kemper Funds and managing director of Scudder Kemper Investments, Inc. Before joining Kemper Funds, John worked for Harris Bank and taught economics at Indiana University.
John holds a B.A. and a Ph.D. degree in economics from Northeastern University in Boston and has a Master’s degree in economics from Brown University in Providence, RI.
John serves as a member of the Blue Chip Panel of Economic Forecasters and also serves on an informal advisory group for the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia. He is a member of the Economic Advisory Committee at the American Bankers Association and is President of the Charlotte Economics Club. In the past, John has served on economic advisory committees to the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, and the Public Securities Association.
In addition, John is Treasurer and a member of the Board of Directors for The Second Harvest Food Bank of Metrolina, a Charlotte civic association. He is also a member of the Business Advisory Committee for the City of Charlotte and he serves on the President’s Council for Charlotte’s Central Piedmont Community College.
Sydney Smith Hicks
NABE Corporate Planning Roundtable Chair
Sydney Smith Hicks is currently a professional director and consultant. She serves on the board of Smart Start, Inc, an ignition interlock company. Smart Start produces ignition interlock devices, franchises nationally, currently in over 25 states, and is the largest company in its industry. Prior to her current focus, she was CEO of VECTORsgi, Inc. and Senior Vice President, Corporate Strategy, for Metavante Corporation. VECTORsgi is a financial technology software and services company which Hicks sold to Metavante in November 2004. Its products and services are sold primarily to the top 125 banks in the U.S. Metavante is a $1.5B company delivering banking and payments technologies to financial services firms and businesses worldwide.
Hicks was CEO of VECTORsgi, Inc., from 2003 to 2006, where she was responsible for maximizing business performance and strategically guiding the growth and expansion of VECTORsgi. Under Hicks’ leadership VECTORsgi expanded product lines, increased sales, and generated increasing levels of profits. Prior to the acquisition by Metavante, VECTORsgi was owned by management and Thoma Cressey Equity Partners; Hicks was also a Board Member. Investors tripled their investment over 15 months.
Before VECTORsgi became private, Hicks was senior vice president of Sterling Commerce and CEO of the Banking Systems Division of Sterling Commerce, the predecessor of VECTORsgi. During Hicks’ tenure, she set the strategy to transform the company from mainframe technologies to distributed technologies. With the advent of Check 21, her company was positioned with new products, allowing the company to capture the market for image exchange. For more than six years prior to being CEO, she was vice president of Operations and Business Development where she led new business development, supervised product acquisitions and was responsible for managing the strategy, design, development, maintenance, installation services, training services, and customized consulting for 11 product solutions, containing over 50 products. Hicks joined Banking Systems as Director of Marketing for Item Processing Solutions in 1996.
Prior to Sterling Commerce, Hicks gained an extensive knowledge of banking and electronic transactions at NationsBank, a predecessor of Bank of America, where she served as senior vice president of Transaction Solutions and Image Initiatives. Hicks was chief economist for NCNB (and First Republic and InterFirst), financial economist for the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas and a visiting scholar for the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. During her career, she was on the board of the Electronic Check Clearing House Organization (ECCHO), was the founding chairman of the board of Payment Systems Network (PSN), now owned by The Clearing House Payments Company, and held various academic positions.
Hicks is currently on two not-for-profit boards in Dallas, is a Mentor/Advisor for STARTech Early Ventures, and is Chair of the Corporate Planning Committee of the National Association of Business Economists. Locally she has led several boards and organizations over the last 25 years, including IWFDallas.
Hicks earned both a master’s degree and a doctorate in Economics from Washington University (St. Louis). She also has a bachelor’s degree in Economics from Cornell College (Iowa), where she graduated with distinction in economics. She currently serves on the Advisory Board of Cornell College’s Berry Center for Economics, Business, and Public Policy.
Christopher Swann
Bureau of Economic Analysis
Christopher Swann is an economist at the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA). He writes the article, “GDP and the Economy” for the monthly publication, Survey of Current Business, and develops research and communications on NIPA and industry topics. Before joining BEA he was a senior consultant and economist at Global Insight, Inc in the macro and international areas, and in telecommunications industry analysis. He began his career at Bell Atlantic (Verizon) where he was engaged in regulatory, corporate planning, product management, and business research. He holds a B.A. in Economics from Washington University, St. Louis, and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in Economics from Temple University in Philadelphia. He is a Past President of the Philadelphia Chapter, a Past Chair of the NABE Technology Roundtable, and currently serves as a member of the NABE Board of Directors.
James Sweeney
Stanford University
James (Jim) Sweeney is Professor of Management Science and Engineering, Senior Fellow of the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, and Senior Fellow of the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace. His professional activities focus on economic policy and analysis, particularly in energy, natural resources, and the environment.
At Stanford he has served as chairman of the Department of Engineering-Economic Systems, chairman of the Department of Engineering-Economic Systems and Operations Research, Director of the Energy Modeling Forum, Chairman of the Institute for Energy Studies, and Director of the Center for Economic Policy Research (now the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research). In the early 1970's he was Director of the Office of Energy Systems Modeling and Forecasting of the U.S. Federal Energy Administration. He was a founding member of the International Association for Energy Economics, co-editor of the Journal Resource and Energy Economics, and vice-president for publications of the International Association for Energy Economics. He is a Senior Fellow of the U.S. Association for Energy Economics and a Fellow of the California Council on Science and Technology. He is on the National Advisory Council of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and a member of Governor Schwarzenegger’s Council of Economic Advisors.
He holds a B.S. degree from MIT in Electrical Engineering and a Ph.D. from Stanford University in Engineering-Economic Systems.
Earl Sweet
BMO Capital Markets
Kevin Swift
American Chemistry Council
A native of Buffalo, New York, Dr. Swift is the chief economist at the American Chemistry
Council (ACC) in Arlington, Virginia where he is responsible for economic and other analyses
dealing with markets, raw materials, trade, tax, energy, and competition and innovation, as well
as monitoring business conditions and identifying emerging trends for the domestic and global
chemical sector. He is an authority on the global chemical industry and his research and
analyses are critical to decision-making by executives and business managers through out the
industry.
Dr. Swift disseminates economic and societal contributions of the business of
chemistry and general information about the industry to ACC member companies, the media,
Wall Street analysts, the academic community and the public in general
Prior to joining the American Chemistry Council, Dr. Swift held executive and senior level
positions at several business information/database companies, directing business research,
forecasting, and consulting efforts as well as domestic and international business forecasting
services and related on-line databases. He also conducted industrial market research and
related projects. Dr. Swift started his career at Dow Chemical USA
.
Dr. Swift is a member of the National Association for Business Economics (NABE) and is a
member of NABE's panel of 40 professional forecasters. He is also a member of the Harvard
Discussion Group of Industrial Economists and is a participant in the Philadelphia Federal
Reserve Bank's forecasters' survey. Dr. Swift is also a member of the Commercial Development
and Marketing Association (CDMA) and the Société de Chimie Industrielle. He has authored
articles in such diverse journals as Business Economics, Chemistry Business, Chimica Oggi,
Cost Engineering, and Hydrocarbon Processing and has appeared on Bloomberg TV and
Nightly Business Report.
Dr. Swift is a graduate of Ashland University with a BA degree and a graduate of Case Western Reserve University with a MA degree in Economics. He is also a graduate of Anglia Polytechnic University with a DBA (doctorate in business administration) degree and has completed the Tax Analysis and Revenue Forecasting Program and other studies at Harvard University as well as studies at the University of Oxford. Dr. Swift is an adjunct instructor of business economics at the University of Mary Washington.
Carl Tannenbaum
La Salle Bank/ABN AMRO N.A.
Carl Tannenbaum is the Chief Economist for LaSalle Bank Corporation, a $100 billion organization centered in Chicago. LaSalle is an affiliate of the ABN AMRO Bank of Holland, one of the world’s largest financial institutions.
In this capacity, Carl provides internal and external briefings on business conditions. He publishes weekly, monthly, and quarterly commentary for distribution to the bank's customers. He serves as a quote contact for a number of publications and provides commentary on business issues for CNBC, CNN, and other media outlets.
Mr. Tannenbaum is a member of the Blue Chip panel of economic forecasters and is President of the National Association for Business Economics. In addition to his economic duties, Carl is also responsible for measuring the organization’s interest rate risk and monitoring its investment portfolio.
Mr. Tannenbaum has been with the organization for twenty-two years. He holds an M.B.A. and a B.A. in finance and economics from the University of Chicago.
John Taylor
Stanford University
John B. Taylor is the Mary and Robert Raymond Professor of Economics at Stanford University and the Bowen H. and Janice Arthur McCoy Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. He formerly served as the director of the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, where he is now a senior fellow, and he was founding director of Stanford's Introductory Economics Center.
Taylor’s academic fields of expertise are macroeconomics, monetary economics, and international economics. He is known for his research on the foundations of modern monetary theory and policy, which has been applied by central banks and financial market analysts around the world. He has an active interest in public policy. Taylor is currently a member of the California Governor's Council of Economic Advisors, where he also previously served from 1996 to 1998. In the past, he served as senior economist on the President's Council of Economic Advisers from 1976 to 1977, as a member of the President's Council of Economic Advisers from 1989 to 1991. He was also a member of the Congressional Budget Office's Panel of Economic Advisers from 1995 to 2001.
For four years from 2001 to 2005, Taylor served as Under Secretary of Treasury for International Affairs where he was responsible for U.S. policies in international finance, which includes currency markets, trade in financial services, foreign investment, international debt and development, and oversight of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. He was also responsible for coordinating financial policy with the G-7 countries, was chair of the working party on international macroeconomics at the OECD, and was a member of the Board of the Overseas Private Investment Corporation. His book Global Financial Warriors: The Untold Story of International Finance in the Post-9/11 World chronicles his years as head of the international division at Treasury.
Taylor was awarded the Alexander Hamilton Award for his overall leadership in international finance at the U.S. Treasury. He was also awarded the Treasury Distinguished Service Award for designing and implementing the currency reforms in Iraq, and the Medal of the Republic of Uruguay for his work in resolving the 2002 financial crisis. In 2005, he was awarded the George P. Shultz Distinguished Public Service Award. Taylor has also won many teaching awards; he was awarded the Hoagland Prize for excellence in undergraduate teaching and the Rhodes Prize for his high teaching ratings in Stanford's introductory economics course. He also received a Guggenheim Fellowship for his research, and he is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Econometric Society; he formerly served as vice president of the American Economic Association.
Before joining the Stanford faculty in 1984, Taylor held positions as professor of economics at Princeton University and Columbia University. Taylor received a B.A. in economics summa cum laude from Princeton University in 1968 and a Ph.D. in economics from Stanford University in 1973.
Paul Thomas
Intel Corporation
Paul Thomas is Chief Economist at Intel Corporation in Santa Clara, California. He joined Intel in December, 2004, after working at Continental Airlines in Houston, Texas, from 1997 to 2004 and as Chief Economist from 2001 to 2004. Paul was Senior Economist at Douglas Aircraft Company in Long Beach, California from 1988 to 1997. Prior to that, he served on the economics faculties of Lake Forest College in Lake Forest, Illinois, and of Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana.
Paul holds a Ph.D. in Business Economics from the Olin School of Business at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. He holds an M.S. in Social Science and a B.S. in Biology from the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California. He also served as Research Fellow in Economics Studies at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C.
Paul and his wife, Kim, live in San Jose, California. Kim is also an economist and served as Chair of the economics department at Whittier College in Whittier, California. Paul is a member of the National Business Economics Issue Council, the European Council of Economics, the Global Interdependence Center, the American Economic Association, and the National Association for Business Economics (NABE). He is a newly elected member of the NABE Board of Directors.
Jane Hughes Turnbull
Peninsula Energy Partners
Jane did her undergraduate work at Wellesley College, and she received a M.S. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. Later she did advanced work in Technology Assessment at George Washington University. In 1981 she joined Pacific Gas and Electric Company in their Washington, D.C. office, transferring out to California to their R&D Department in 1986. Major research included assessments of desalination and water and waste treatment technologies and evaluations of and support for commercialization of renewable energy options.
In 1991 Jane joined the Renewables Generation staff of the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI). Her work at EPRI focused largely on the opportunities and challenges of sustainable integrated biomass systems. In 1997 Jane started her own company, Peninsula Energy Partners. The objective of the company is to foster the development and commercialization of renewable energy systems, with an emphasis on the opportunities to produce and utilize biomass in environmentally sound and economically viable ways.
While at EPRI, Jane was instrumental in establishing the National Biofuels Roundtable, the Southeastern Bioenergy Roundtable, and the Short Rotation Crop Operations Working Group. In 1999 she was appointed to the National Coal Council, but resigned when President Bush withdrew from the Kyoto Accord. She chairs the advisory committee for the University of California at Davis Department of Biological and Agricultural Engineering. She also is on the board of the California Biomass Collaborative, a statewide organization dedicated to the development of sustainable biomass technologies. In 2006 she was appointed to the governor’s committee to review the use of the Public Goods Charge, a component of most electric bills in the state. She serves on the CAISO’s committee to recommend candidates for its Board of Governors, and the California Energy Commission’s steering committee on transmission corridor policy development.
After retiring from EPRI, Jane served as a technical consultant on a research project directed toward reducing NOx emission reductions by as much as 90 percent by using biomass as a reburn fuel, conducted a comprehensive market assessment for a small biomass gasification technology developed at Iowa State University, completed a comprehensive assessment of the potential for additional use of agricultural residues for power production in Thailand for the United Nations Industrial Development Organization, was involved in defining a solution to the sawdust disposal concerns of saw mills in Romania, and recently completed a Life Cycle Analysis of Anaerobic Digestion Systems for the Int’l Energy Agency.
Since 2002 Jane has served as Energy Program Director for the League of Women Voters of California and, following three years as president, she now is vice-president of the Los Altos Mountain View League of Women Voters. She was named Outstanding Woman in the Community by the Los Altos-Mountain View chapter of AAUW and received a similar award from the Los Altos Community Foundation, both in 2005.
Jane has been working in collaboration with Dr. Ruihong Zhang, professor of Biological and Agricultural Engineering at the University of California at Davis for the past ten years. A year ago, they were awarded a patent for an integrated system to address pollution concerns associated with agricultural waste and wastewaters. Last year, this new technology was named a finalist in this year’s California Clean Technology Open competition. She currently is working on a business plan to commercialize this technology.
Jane married G. Stanley Turnbull in 1989. Her son Geoffrey S. Bergler plays the trumpet in the Seattle Symphony.
Publications over the past fifteen years are: “Strategies for Achieving a Sustainable, Clean and Cost-Effective Biomass Resource”; “A ‘How-to’ Primer for Biomass Resource Development”; “Benefits and Detriments of Deploying Genetically Engineered Woody Biomass Crops”; “BESIE: A First-Stage Evaluator for Biomass Energy Systems”; “Making Biopower Work for Utilities: A Rationale for Near-Term Investment in Integrated Biomass Power Systems”; Other papers, besides those in conference proceedings, are: Turnbull, Jane Hughes, “Use of Biomass in Electric Power Generation: the California Experience,” Biomass and Bioenergy Vol. 4, No.2, pp.75-84, 1993; Turnbull, Jane Hughes, “Developing an Integrated Approach to Biomass Energy Systems in the United States,” Biomass and Bioenergy Vol. 6, No. 1/2, pp 151-158, 1994; Turnbull, Jane H., “Strategies for Achieving a Sustainable, Clean and Cost-Effective Biomass Resource,” Biomass and Bioenergy Vol.10, Nos 2-3, pp. 93-100, 1996
Hal Varian
Google
Hal R. Varian is the Chief Economist at Google. He started in May 2002 as a consultant and has been involved in many aspects of the company, including auction design, econometric, finance, corporate strategy and public policy.
He also holds academic appointments at the University of California, Berkeley in three departments: business, economics, and information management.
He received his SB degree from MIT in 1969 and his MA in mathematics and Ph.D. in economics from UC Berkeley in 1973. He has also taught at MIT, Stanford, Oxford, Michigan and other universities around the world.
Dr. Varian is a fellow of the Guggenheim Foundation, the Econometric Society, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was Co-Editor of the American Economic Review from 1987-1990 and holds honorary doctorates from the University of Oulu, Finland and the University of Karlsruhe, Germany.
Professor Varian has published numerous papers in economic theory, industrial organization, financial economics, econometrics and information economics. He is the author of two major economics textbooks which have been translated into 22 languages. He is the co-author of a bestselling book on business strategy, Information Rules: A Strategic Guide to the Network Economy and wrote a monthly column for the New York Times from 2000 to 2007.
Chris Varvares
Macroeconomic Advisers
Chris Varvares is President of Macroeconomic Advisers, a company he co-founded with Joel Prakken and Laurence Meyer as Laurence H. Meyer & Associates in 1982. The firm became Macroeconomic Advisers in June of 1996 when Dr. Meyer joined the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System.
Mr. Varvares has roughly 25 years of experience in macroeconomic forecasting and policy analysis, both as a principal of Macroeconomic Advisers (1982 to present) and as a member of the staff of the President's Council of Economic Advisers (1981-1982). While at the Council, he served as a member of the U.S. delegation to the OECD in April 1982. Mr. Varvares is a Director of the National Association of for Business Economics (NABE), a member and former President of the St. Louis Chapter of NABE, and is a member of the American Economic Association. He participates as a guest panelist for the Congressional Budget Office's Panel of Economic Advisers, serves as a member of Time Magazine's Board of Economists, is member of New York State's Economic Advisory Board, and has been a panelist for the World Economic Forum.
Mr. Varvares holds a B.A. in Economics from the George Washington University and received his graduate training in economics from Washington University in St. Louis.
John K. Veroneau
Office of the U.S. Trade Representative
Ambassador John K. Veroneau serves as Deputy U.S. Trade Representative, nominated for this position by President George W. Bush, and confirmed by the Senate on September 29, 2006.
Ambassador Veroneau’s portfolio includes trade relations with Europe and Eurasia, the Middle East, and the Americas, as well as matters involving the World Trade Organization (WTO). He also oversees USTR’s functional offices handling intellectual property, telecommunications, pharmaceuticals, services, and market access.
Prior to his confirmation as Deputy USTR, Ambassador Veroneau served as a partner at the law firm of DLA Piper. Earlier in President Bush’s administration, Ambassador Veroneau served as General Counsel in the Office of the United States Trade Representative (2003-2005). Veroneau’s experience as USTR General Counsel included testifying before Congress on US trade policy and negotiations, recommending and implementing the Administration’s litigation priorities, and overseeing the drafting of bilateral trade agreements. In addition, he served as Assistant USTR for Congressional Affairs from 2001 to 2003.
Ambassador Veroneau began his public service career working in the United States Senate. From 1989-1997, Veroneau served as Legislative Director to U.S. Senator William S. Cohen (Maine), Legislative Director to former U.S. Majority Leader Bill Frist (Tennessee), and Chief of Staff to U.S. Senator M. Susan Collins (Maine). From 1997-2001, Mr. Veroneau served under then Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen. In 1999, he was nominated by President Clinton and confirmed by the U.S. Senate to be the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Legislative Affairs.
Ambassador Veroneau has written and spoken widely on issues of international trade from both a legal and foreign policy perspective. He holds a bachelor’s degree and a law degree from University of Maine. He is married to Carol Svoboda and has two children.
Cliff Waldman,
Manufacturers Alliance/MAPI
Cliff Waldman is an Economist with the Manufacturers Alliance/MAPI since 2003. He is the author of the research paper The Labor Market in Post-Reform China: History, Evidence, and Implications and of the Quarterly Forecast of U.S. Exports, Global Growth, and the Dollar. He is a participant in the Bloomberg News survey of economists.
Previously he has been President, Waldman Associates; Economist, National Federation for Independent Business (NFIB); Economist, New Jersey Department of Labor.
He has a B.A., Economics and English, from Rutgers University and an M.A., Economics, from Rutgers University.
David A. Walters
Office of the United State Trade Representative
David A. Walters is the chief economist at USTR responsible for economic analysis related to trade negotiations. His office assists USTR negotiators in analyzing the economic impact of pending trade agreements, and prepares numerous reports examining the benefits of trade and economic growth.
Mr. Walters has nearly two decades of experience as an economist specializing in trade issues. During that time the increasing number of trade agreements and growth of the global economy has created a greater demand for economic analysis. Mr. Walters prepares numerous reports that assist U.S. negotiators in assessing the impact of trade.
“I believe we’re building a system in which prosperity will grow. We’re doing something to benefit Americans directly through increased prosperity, and indirectly by helping to assure a more peaceful world,” he says.
Before joining USTR, Mr. Walters worked at the National Science Foundation in Washington, D.C. and the American Paper Institute in New York. Mr. Walters holds degrees from Brown University, the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva, Switzerland, where he taught economics.
A native of Providence, R.I., Mr. Walters is a Vietnam-era Army veteran.
James A. Wilcox,
Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley
James A. Wilcox is the Kruttschnitt Professor of Financial Institutions at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley.
Jim is an award-winning professor, who teaches courses on business conditions, on financial markets and institutions, and on risk management at financial institutions. Jim has published widely on banking, housing and mortgage markets, monetary policy, and business conditions.
From 1999-2001, Jim was the Chief Economist at the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. Previously, he had served in Washington as the senior economist for monetary policy and macroeconomics for the President’s Council of Economic Advisers and as an economist for the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. He a Fellow of the Wharton Financial Institutions Center and is a founding Fellow of the Filene Research Institute. Jim received his Ph.D. in economics from Northwestern University.
Janet Yellen
Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco
Janet L. Yellen took office as President and Chief Executive Officer of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco on June 14, 2004. In this role, Dr. Yellen fully participates in meetings of the Federal Open Market Committee, bringing her District's perspective to policy discussions in Washington.
Dr. Yellen is Professor Emeritus at the University of California at Berkeley where she was the Eugene E. and Catherine M. Trefethen Professor of Business and Professor of Economics and has been a faculty member since 1980.
Dr. Yellen earlier took leave from Berkeley for five years starting August 1994 when she served as a member of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System through February 1997, and then left the Fed to become Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers through August 1999. She also chaired the Economic Policy Committee of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development from 1997 to 1999.
Dr. Yellen is a member of both the Council on Foreign Relations and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. She also serves on the board of directors of the Pacific Council on International Policy, and in the recent past, she served as president of the Western Economic Association, vice president of the American Economic Association and was a Fellow of the Yale Corporation.
Dr. Yellen graduated summa cum laude from Brown University with a degree in economics in 1967, and received her PhD in Economics from Yale University in 1971. She received the Wilbur Cross Medal from Yale in 1997, an honorary Doctor of Laws degree from Brown in 1998, and an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters from Bard College in 2000.
An Assistant Professor at Harvard University from 1971 to 1976, Dr. Yellen served as an economist with the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors in 1977 and 1978, and on the faculty of the London School of Economics and Political Science from 1978 to 1980.
Dr. Yellen has written on a wide variety of macroeconomic issues, while specializing in the causes, mechanisms and implications of unemployment.
Robert Young
American Farm Bureau Federation
Bob joined American Farm Bureau Federation in 2003 as the Chief Economist, coordinating the activities of the Economic Analysis Team.
Prior to coming to Farm Bureau, Young was Co-Director of the Food and Agricultural Policy Research Institute (FAPRI) from 1991 through 2003. Bob also served as an associate professor in Agricultural Economics at the University of Missouri.
While at FAPRI, Bob helped to develop an analysis team in the Republic and North Ireland, establishing the FAPRI-Ireland partnership, a consortia of government and university based analysts who now provide analytical support to the United Kingdom and Ireland.
Before becoming the Co-Director of FAPRI, Bob served as the Chief Economist of the United State Senate Committee on Agriculture from 1987 through 1991. There he was active in the development of the 1990 Farm Bill as well as various budget and disaster assistance bills.
Bob has a Ph.D. in Agricultural Economics from the University of Missouri, with a B.S. and M.S. in Atmospheric Sciences from the University of Missouri as well.
Bob and his wife Victoria reside in Graysville, Maryland.
