Welcome Aboard, New NABE Members!

Please join the NABE Board of Directors and staff in welcoming new members who joined in recent months.  Between January and September of this year, 322 new members have joined NABE. The first issue of two IdeaLinks e-mailed to NABE members each month includes a listing of new members. Here are selections from brief interviews, conducted by e-mail, with four new members:

Alencia Aghayere
Wells Fargo Bank
Keller, Texas

What is your current position?
My current position and title is analyst for Wells Fargo Bank and adjunct professor of economics for Tarrant County College NW campus.  I have been an analyst with Wells Fargo for the past five years and began my teaching career this fall.

What is the main focus of your company or organization?
Wells Fargo is an industry leader in the financial services sector serving over 30 million customers.

What are your career highlights and education--before your current job?
I have over 20 years of corporate experience in an array of fields as well as recently obtaining an MBA from the University of Texas at Arlington in both marketing and economics, with an emphasis on research.

Why did you join NABE?
NABE is in my opinion one of the finest if not the best professional economics organization anywhere, and I want to learn and network with the best!

Andrew Fisher
Program Manger
Cisco Systems
San Jose, Calif.

What is your current position?
I'm a program manager at Cisco Systems in the Manufacturing Department.  I manage a team of six analysts with backgrounds in operations research, supply chain management, engineering, and statistics.  I'm the only economist. I started in this role in March of 2008.

What is the main focus of your company or organization?
Cisco sells IP-based networking and other hardware and software products and services for the communications and IT industries.  My team sits in the demand planning organization within Manufacturing, and we provide a statistical forecast for most of Cisco's hardware products.  The statistical forecast and demand plan are used to determine how many parts we need to order and how many products we need to build, to make sure we have just the right amount of inventory.

What are your career highlights and education--before your current job?
I have a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Georgia in 2002, with a focus on time series econometrics and monetary economics.  Earlier in my career I worked in credit risk management, in the Credit Risk Architecture department at Wells Fargo Bank, and later in the Portfolio Advisory Services group at Moody's KMV, a subsidiary of Moody's Corp.

Why did you join NABE?
For much of my career, I was more focused on risk management and banking than on economics.  In my current role at Cisco, economic analysis and econometrics are quite useful for what I do on a day-to-day basis.  I'm excited about engaging with other business economists and seeing how they've applied their economic toolkit to "real world" business problems.  Also, I'd like to help open up private sector opportunities to econ grad students, as they might not be as exposed to these types of opportunities in the academic setting.

What drew you to economics?
When I took Econ 101 in college and the professor discussed "counting utils", I thought it was nonsense.  Once I got to intermediate microeconomics with Professor Varian's textbook, I thought it was great! It just clicked!  I decided to go to grad school to focus on monetary economics.  But, about halfway through the program, the starting salary discrepancy between finance and economics became clear to me.  So in my fourth year, instead of focusing on my dissertation, I loaded up on the derivatives modeling, asset pricing, and financial econometrics classes in the Finance Department to "brand" myself as a financial economist.  I took the Wells Fargo job in 2000 after my fourth year, and wrote my dissertation on evenings and weekends, completing it in 2002.  Now I'm happily doing real-world economics!

Elisabeth Fosslien
Associate Economist
Payden & Rygel
Los Angeles

 What is your current position?
I am the associate economist for Payden & Rygel. I primarily assist our chief economist, Tom Higgins, in developing views on the U.S. and global economy. My research areas include general U.S. and global macroeconomic trends, monetary policy, and financial market cycles.  I have been the associate economist at Payden for three months.

What is the main focus of your company or organization?
Payden & Rygel is a global money management firm that manages $50 billion in assets and provides customized investment strategies and products that focus on each client's specific needs and objectives. Payden & Rygel is headquartered in Los Angeles with offices in London, Frankfurt, and Tokyo.

What are your career highlights and education--before your current job?

I received a B.A. in mathematical economics from Pomona College in 2009.  Before joining Payden & Rygel, I interned at the White House Council of Economic Advisors, where I co-wrote a chapter in the 2008 Economic Report of the President on alternative energy.

Why did you join NABE?
I joined NABE both as a way to meet and learn from other business economists and because of the interesting presentations it offers.

What drew you to economics?
I was drawn to economics because it explains a large part of both history and individuals' daily actions.  It also provides a broader context in which it is easier to understand long-term trends in financial markets.

James Kielkopf
Economist
AgriBank, FCB 
St. Paul, Minn.

What is your current position?
I am an economist for AgriBank, FCB, with the role of chief economist for the AgriBank District of the Federal Farm Credit System (FCS).   I've been in this position two years, with over ten years in the financial industry.

What is the main focus of your company or organization?
AgriBank is the largest of five cooperative wholesale banks that make up the FCS, which, established in 1916, accounts for about 40 percent of all agricultural lending in the United States.  (Commercial banks account for another 40 percent, with private investors and insurance companies making up the rest.) AgriBank's role is to provide loans to farmer-owned credit associations, commercial agricultural lenders, and directly to large agribusinesses. The AgriBank District encompasses most of the American Midwest and includes about 55 percent of American cropland.

What are your career highlights and education--before your current job?
I earned a B.A. in economics at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, and an
M.S. in applied and agricultural economics at the University of Minnesota.  I’m working toward a Ph.D. at the Milano School of Management and Urban Policy, New School, N.Y.

Before being hired to replace the retiring chief economist at AgriBank, I worked for five years in credit risk management as director of credit risk for Green Tree Servicing Corporation, managing the nation's largest portfolio of subprime mobile home loans and doing economic forecasting. There I introduced the use of hazard models from survival analysis to value portfolios and securitizations of subprime mortgages and to enhance traditional credit score underwriting.  Following my work at Green Tree I returned to graduate school to earn a PhD at the Milano School of Management and Urban Policy.

Going back further, I've also worked as an assistant economist at the Minneapolis Grain Exchange and as an AVP of market research for TCF Bank, both in Minneapolis. And, right out of college, I lived for five years in South America, setting up rural credit unions as a Catholic missionary.

Why did you join NABE?
I'm a working, business economist, so it seemed the right group to be in to keep up with the field.

What drew you to economics?
Truth is, I started out in international studies at Johns Hopkins, but I couldn't learn Spanish, so I changed to economics, which had no foreign language requirement.  (I've since become fluent in Spanish, however.)

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