Fifteenth Jacques Polak Annual Research Conference: "Cross-Border Spillovers"

Olivier Blanchard is the IMF Economic Counsellor and Director, Research Department.

A citizen of France, Olivier Blanchard has spent his professional life in Cambridge, U.S. After obtaining his Ph.D in economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1977, he taught at Harvard University, returning to MIT in 1982, where he has been since then. He is the Class of 1941 Professor of Economics, and past Chair of the Economics Department. He is currently on leave from MIT, as Economic Counsellor and Director of the Research Department of the International Monetary Fund.

He is a macroeconomist, who has worked on a wide set of issues, from the role of monetary policy, to the nature of speculative bubbles, to the nature of the labor market and the determinants of unemployment, to transition in former communist countries. In the process, he has worked with numerous countries and international organizations. He is the author of many books and articles, including two textbooks in macroeconomics, one at the graduate level with Stanley Fischer, one at the undergraduate level.

He is a fellow and Council member of the Econometric Society, a past vice president of the American Economic Association, and a member of the American Academy of Sciences.

José Viñals is currently the Financial Counsellor and Director of the Monetary and Capital Markets Department of the International Monetary Fund (IMF). He is a member of the Financial Stability Board, representing the IMF.

His professional career has been closely tied to the Central Bank of Spain, where he served as the Deputy Governor after holding successive positions.

He has also held the positions of Chairman of the European Central Bank International Relations Committee; and Chairman of Spain’s Deposit Guarantee Funds.

He has been a member of: the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) Committee on the Global Financial System; the European Central Bank Monetary Policy Committee; and the high-level group appointed by the President of the European Commission to examine economic challenges in the European Union. He was also a member of the European Union Economic and Financial Committee and a Board Member of the Spanish Securities Authority, the Comisión Nacional del Mercado de Valores. He holds a Bachelor's degree in Economics from the University of Valencia; a Master’s degree in Economics from the London School of Economics; and Master's and Doctoral (Ph.D.) degrees in Economics from Harvard University. He is a former Faculty Member of the Economics Department at Stanford University.

His awards include the Premio Rey Jaime I (King James I Prize) in Economics in 2001.

Lawrence Ball is a professor of economics at Johns Hopkins University, where he has served since 1994; a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research; and a Visiting Scholar at the International Monetary Fund. He has previously been a Visiting Scholar at a number of central banks, including the Federal Reserve, the Bank of England, the Bank of Japan, and the Reserve Bank of New Zealand.

He is the author of Money, Banking, and Financial Markets (Worth Publishers), and his research interests include unemployment, inflation, and monetary and fiscal policy. He received a Ph.D. from MIT in 1986.

Marco Lo Duca is currently Principal Financial Stability Expert in the Financial Surveillance Division of the European Central Bank. Marco graduated in 2002 from the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice with a bachelor's degree in financial econometrics. In 2004, he earned a Master Degree cum Laude in Economics and Finance from the International Center of Economics and Finance (ICEF) of the Venice International University (VIU). Marco joined the European Central Bank in 2004, after briefly working for a consulting firm. He has worked in different business areas at the European Central Bank including Research, Economics, International and European Relations and Financial Stability. Marco has published in academic journals including, among others, the Journal of Monetary Economics, the Journal of Banking and Finance, the International Journal of Central Banking. Marco is also author of a number of articles and working papers in the area of monetary policy spill-overs and the transmission of financial shocks.

Egon Zakrajšek is an Associate Director in the Division of Monetary Affairs, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System in Washington, DC.

His research focuses on the predictive content of asset prices for economic outcomes; the influence of financial factors on macroeconomic dynamics; pricing behavior in bank-intermediated credit markets; macroeconomic stress tests; and the implications of financial market frictions for firms’ investment financing, and pricing decisions.

He received a B.A. in economics from University of California Santa Cruz and a Ph.D. in economics from New York University. Before coming to the Federal Reserve Board, Mr. Zakrajšek was an economist at the research department of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. He also has taught economics at Columbia University in New York and Johns Hopkins University in Washington DC.

Jonathan Wright is a professor of economics at Johns Hopkins University, specializing in time series econometrics and empirical macroeconomics and finance.

His recent topics of research include high-frequency effects of macroeconomic news announcements, forecasting, seasonal adjustment, the term structure of interest rates, and unconventional monetary policy.

He is a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and a Research Fellow at the Centre for Economic Policy Research. Prof. Wright is coeditor of the Journal of Applied Econometrics, associate editor of the Journal of Monetary Economics, and former coeditor of the Journal of Business and Economic Statistics. From 1999 to 2008, he worked at the Federal Reserve Board in the Divisions of International Finance and Monetary Affairs, ending as deputy associate director. He has also taught at the University of Virginia, University of Pennsylvania and University of Maryland. Jonathan Wright did a B.A. at Trinity College Dublin, an M.Sc. at the London School of Economics and a Ph.D. at Harvard University.

Vitor Gaspar is the Director of Fiscal Affairs Department, IMF.

Mr. Gaspar, a Portuguese national, has held a variety of senior policy positions in Banco de Portugal, including most recently as Special Adviser. He served as Minister of State and Finance of Portugal during 2011-2013. He was acting director-general of the European Commission’s Bureau of European Policy Advisers during 2007-2010 and director-general of general research at the European Central Bank from 1998-2004.

Mr. Gaspar holds a Ph.D and a post-doctoral agregado in Economics from Universidade Nova de Lisboa; he also studied at Universidade Católica Portuguesa.

Yan Bai is Bai is an assistant professor of economics at the University of Rochester.

Yan completed her PhD in economics from the University of Minnesota, having completed her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in China. Prior to coming to Rochester, Yan was a visiting scholar at Princeton University and an assistant professor at Arizona State University.

Yan’s research focuses on international macroeconomics, and she has written a number of papers on the role that barriers to financial investment have on international capital flows and business cycles. Her most recent work examines the role of uncertainty in why employment drops so much during economic downturns—a key puzzle for the great recession and the disappointing recent recovery.

Alberto Martin is a Senior Economist in the IMF’s Research Department on leave from the Centre de Recerca en Economia Internacional (CREI) and the Barcelona Graduate School of Economics, where he respectively serves as a Senior Researcher and a Research Professor.

He is also a Research Affiliate at the Center for Economic and Policy Research (London) and a member of the editorial board of the Review of Economic Studies.

Martin´s research lies at the intersection of macroeconomics and finance. His work has been published in leading economic journals including the American Economic Review, the Journal of Finance and the Journal of Economic Theory.

In the past, Martin has been a Research Fellow at the IMF, a Lamfalussy Fellow at the European Central Bank, and a Fulbright Fellow. He has also consulted for the United Nations Development Program and worked in Argentina’s Ministry of Economics. He holds a PhD in Economics from Columbia University.

David Wessel is director of the Hutchins Center on Fiscal and Monetary Policy, which provides independent, non-partisan analysis of fiscal and monetary policy issues in order to further public understanding and to improve the quality and effectiveness of those policies.

He joined Brookings in December 2013 after 30 years on the staff of The Wall Street Journal where, most recently, he was economics editor and wrote the weekly Capital column. He is a contributing correspondent to The Wall Street Journal, appears frequently on NPR’s Morning Edition and tweets often at @davidmwessel

David is the author of two New York Times best-sellers: "In Fed We Trust: Ben Bernanke's War on the Great Panic" (2009) and "Red Ink: Inside the High Stakes Politics of the Federal Budget" (2012.) He has shared two Pulitzer Prizes, one in 1984 for a Boston Globe series on the persistence of racism in Boston and the other in 2003 for Wall Street Journal stories on corporate scandals.

A native of New Haven, Conn., and a product of its public schools, David is a 1975 graduate of Haverford College. He was a Knight-Bagehot Fellow in Business and Economics Journalism at Columbia University in 1980-81.

Changyong Rhee is the Director of the IMF Asia and Pacific Department.

Changyong Rhee assumed his current position as Director of the Asia and Pacific Department of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in February 2014.

Prior to coming to the Fund Dr. Rhee was chief economist at the Asian Development Bank (ADB). He was the chief spokesperson for ADB on economic and development trends, and oversaw the Economics and Research Department. Dr. Rhee was the secretary-general of the G20 summit’s Presidential Committee in the Republic of Korea.

Prior to his appointment at the FSC, Dr. Rhee was a Professor of Economics at Seoul National University and Assistant Professor at University of Rochester. He was also a frequent and active policy advisor to the Government of Korea, including in the Office of the President, the Ministry of Finance and Economy, the Bank of Korea, the Korea Securities Depository, and the Korea Development Institute.

His key research interests include macroeconomics, financial economics, and the Korean economy. He has published many papers in these fields. Dr. Rhee obtained his Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard University, and his Bachelor degree in Economics from Seoul National University.

Jonathan Heathcote is a Monetary Advisor in the Research Department of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis.

Between 2006 and 2008 he was an economist in the International Finance Division of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. Prior to that position he was an Assistant and then Associate Professor at Georgetown University. He has also taught at the Stockholm School of Economics, at Duke University, and at the Stern School of Business, New York University. He received a B.A. in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics from Keble College, Oxford University, in 1993, and a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Pennsylvania in 1998.

He has worked on a range of topics in macroeconomics and international finance. Much of his work in macroeconomics has been to do with understanding cross-sectional inequality in income and consumption. Recently he has focused on the optimal design of redistributive tax and transfer systems. In international finance Jonathan has worked, mostly with Fabrizio Perri, on models of international risk sharing and business cycles. Some of that work is discussed in a recent chapter they wrote for the Handbook of International Economics entitled “Assessing International Efficiency”.

Markus Brunnermeier is the Edwards S. Sanford Professor at Princeton University. He is a faculty member of the Department of Economics and director of Princeton's Bendheim Center for Finance. He is the founding and former director of Princeton’s Julis Rabinowitz Center for Public Policy and Finance and affiliated with the International Economics Section. He is also a research associate at NBER, CEPR, and CESifo. He is a member of several advisory groups, including to the IMF, the New York Federal Reserve, the European Systemic Risk Board, and the Bundesbank. Brunnermeier was awarded his Ph.D. by the London School of Economics (LSE).

His research focuses on financial markets and the macroeconomy with special emphasis on bubbles, liquidity, financial and monetary price stability. To explore these topics, his models incorporate frictions as well as behavioral elements. He is a Sloan Research Fellow, Fellow of the Econometric Society and the recipient of the Bernácer Prize granted for outstanding contributions in the fields of macroeconomics and finance. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship for studying the impact of financial frictions on the macroeconomy. He has been awarded several best paper prices and served on the editorial boards of several leading economics and finance journals.

Anton Korinek is a faculty member at the Department of Economics at Johns Hopkins University and a Faculty Research Fellow at the NBER.

His area of expertise is international finance and macroeconomics. In his current research, he focuses on capital controls and macroprudential regulation as policy instruments to reduce the risk of financial crises. He investigates the global spillover effects of such policy measures as well as their implications for income inequality.

He received his PhD from Columbia University in 2007 under the supervision of Joseph Stiglitz. He has also worked at the University of Maryland and has been a visiting scholar at the International Monetary Fund, Harvard University, the World Bank, the Bank for International Settlements, the Bundesbank and the Dutch National Bank. Prior to his academic career, he worked for three years in the financial sector.

Korinek’s work has been influential in both the academic and policy debate on capital flow regulation. He has won several fellowships, most recently from the International Monetary Fund, from the Institute for New Economic Thinking and from the Bank for International Settlements.

Hélène Rey is Professor of Economics at London Business School.

Until 2007, she was at Princeton University, as Professor of Economics and International Affairs in the Economics Department and the Woodrow Wilson School. Her research focuses on the determinants and consequences of external imbalances, the theory of financial crises, the links between monetary policy and the financial sector and the organization of the international monetary system. In 2005 she was awarded an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship and in 2006 the Bernácer Prize. In 2012 she received the inaugural Birgit Grodal Award of the European Economic Association, in 2013 the Yrjö Jahnsson Award (best European economist under the age of 45) jointly with Thomas Piketty and in 2014 the inaugural Carl Menger Preis.

Professor Rey is a member of the Board of the Review of Economic Studies and an associate editor of the AEJ: Macroeconomics Journal. She is a CEPR Research Fellow and an NBER Research Associate, a Fellow of the British Academy, of the European Economic Association and of the Econometric Society. She is a member of the Haut Conseil de la Stabilité Financière, of the Commission Economique de la Nation and of the Bellagio Group on the international economy.

Hélène Rey received her PhDs from the London School of Economics and the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales.

Olivier Blanchard is the IMF Economic Counsellor and Director, Research Department.

A citizen of France, Olivier Blanchard has spent his professional life in Cambridge, U.S. After obtaining his Ph.D in economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1977, he taught at Harvard University, returning to MIT in 1982, where he has been since then. He is the Class of 1941 Professor of Economics, and past Chair of the Economics Department. He is currently on leave from MIT, as Economic Counsellor and Director of the Research Department of the International Monetary Fund.

He is a macroeconomist, who has worked on a wide set of issues, from the role of monetary policy, to the nature of speculative bubbles, to the nature of the labor market and the determinants of unemployment, to transition in former communist countries. In the process, he has worked with numerous countries and international organizations. He is the author of many books and articles, including two textbooks in macroeconomics, one at the graduate level with Stanley Fischer, one at the undergraduate level.

He is a fellow and Council member of the Econometric Society, a past vice president of the American Economic Association, and a member of the American Academy of Sciences.

Sharmini Coorey is the Director of the IMF Institute for Capacity Development.

Sharmini Coorey, a national of Sri Lanka, has been the Director of the Institute for Capacity Development since May 1, 2012, and Director of the IMF Institute since January 2012. (The IMF Institute merged with the Office of Technical Assistance Management on May 1, 2012 to become the Institute for Capacity Development.). The Institute aims to promote stronger synergies and better coordination between IMF technical assistance, training and other elements of capacity development; help the IMF’s capacity development activities better adapt to member countries’ needs and priorities; and raise funds from donors for these activities. It also delivers training to country officials through a global network of eight training centers and oversees the management of nine regional technical assistance centers around the world. In addition, the Institute provides internal economics training to strengthen the ability of Fund staff to provide high quality analysis and advice to member countries.

Before heading the Institute, Ms. Coorey was Deputy Director in the IMF’s African Department where she oversaw the Fund’s work in a number of countries including South Africa, Botswana, Swaziland, Zimbabwe, Malawi, and the CEMAC region. Her oversight responsibilities also included the department’s financial sector work and research agenda. Ms. Coorey has also worked in the IMF’s European Department, Asian Department, Western Hemisphere Department and the Policy Development and Review Department. Her experience includes work on surveillance and Fund-supported programs in a range of industrial and emerging economies including the United Kingdom, Ireland, Estonia, Korea, Mexico and the United States as well as on various Fund-wide policy issues. She also served on the Editorial Committee of IMF Staff Papers and was a visiting researcher at George Washington University’s Elliot School for International Affairs.

Ms. Coorey holds a Ph.D. and a bachelor’s degree in Economics from Harvard University. She has published papers on inflation and economic growth in transition and developing countries and edited a book on managing the oil wealth of the CEMAC region.

Thomas Philippon is Professor of Finance at New York University - Stern School of Business.

His research focuses on finance and macroeconomics. It includes empirical and theoretical work on financial distress and systemic risk; the links between asset markets, corporate investment and firm dynamics; the evolution of the financial industry; the design of optimal interventions during financial crises; labor relations and unemployment; corporate governance and accounting manipulations.

Philippon was named one of the “top 25 economists under age 45” by the IMF, and he has won the 2013 Bernácer Prize for Best European Economist under 40, the 2010 Michael Brennan & BlackRock Award (for best paper in the Review of Financial Studies), the 2009 Prize for Best Young French Economist (Cercle des économistes/ Le Monde), the 2008 Brattle Prize for the best paper in Corporate Finance (Journal of Finance), and the Stylo d’Or de l’ANDRH in 2007 (for the best book on Human Resources Management). He was elected Global Economic Fellow in 2009 by the Kiel Institute for the World Economy.

He was on leave during the academic year 2012-2013, working as senior economic advisor to the french finance minister.

Philippon graduated from Ecole Polytechnique, received a PhD in Economics from MIT, and joined New York University in 2003.

Email: tphilipp@stern.nyu.edu Phone: +1 212 998 0490 Web page: http://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~tphilipp/

Stijn Claessens is Assistant Director in the Research Department of the International Monetary Fund.

Mr. Claessens, a Dutch national, holds a Ph.D. in business economics from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and M.A. from Erasmus University, Rotterdam. He started his career teaching at the New York University business school and also taught at the University of Amsterdam. He has worked for sixteen years at the World Bank in various positions, ending as Senior Adviser in the Financial and Private Sector Vice-Presidency.

His policy and research interests are in finance, including corporate governance, risk management, globalization, and business and financial cycles. Over his career, Mr. Claessens has provided policy advice to many countries. His research has been published in many prestigious journals and he has written and edited several books.

He is an associate editor at the IMF Economic Review and other journals, and a CEPR fellow.

Aaron Flaaen is a Ph.D. candidate in economics at the University of Michigan with interests in international trade, multinational firm behavior, and macroeconomics.

His research explores the impact of multinational firms on both source and host economies. Ongoing projects include examining the role of vertical linkages by multinationals in generating business cycle co-movement among advanced countries, comparing the characteristics of foreign affiliates with exporting and domestic-only firms, and measuring the domestic labor market effects of international expansions. All of these projects use innovative firm-level data from the Census Bureau, allowing for a more disaggregated analysis of the determinants and effects of multinational activity.

Prior to beginning his graduate studies at the University of Michigan, he worked as a senior research assistant at the Brookings Institution in Washington D.C. While at Brookings, he co-authored several research papers on topics ranging from U.S. trade with China and India to the determinants of the 2008-09 financial crisis. He holds a B.S. in economics and international business from the University of South Carolina, and an M.A. in economics from the University of Michigan.

Alejandro Werner is the Director of the IMF Western Hemisphere Department.

Alejandro Werner assumed his current position as Director of the Western Hemisphere Department of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in January 2013.

A Mexican citizen, Mr. Werner has had distinguished careers in the public and private sectors as well as in academia. Most recently, he served as Undersecretary of Finance and Public Credit of Mexico from Dec. 2006 until August 2010, was Professor of Economics at the Instituto de Empresa in Madrid Spain (from August 2010-July 2011), and Head of Corporate and Investment banking at BBVA-Bancomer (from August 2011 until end-2012). Previously he was Director of Economic Studies at the Bank of Mexico and professor at ITAM.

He has published widely. Mr. Werner was named Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum in 2007. Mr. Werner received his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1994.

Márcio Garcia is associate professor at PUC-Rio, Brazil, since 1991, having already served as Department Chairman and Director of both Graduate and Undergraduate Studies. He holds a Ph.D. from Stanford University Economics Department. His areas of research are International Finance and Monetary Economics. Marcio has been visiting professor/scholar at the economics departments of Stanford, Chicago, MIT and MIT/Sloan, in the US, and at Paris School of Economics (then, DELTA) and Université D’Evry-Val-D’Essone, in France. He has consulted for international and Brazilian institutions, as The World Bank, IMF, IADB, ECLAC/UN, BM&F Bovespa, BNDES, Icatu, ANBID, NEO Investimentos, and others. His academic papers and Op-Ed articles are available online. He is a member of the Bellagio Group.

Sebastian Edwards is the Henry Ford II Professor of International Economics at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the Co-Director of the National Bureau of Economic Research's "Africa Project" and previously served as the Chief Economist for Latin America at the World Bank. His research interests include emerging markets, currency crises, capital markets, Latin America, monetary policy, and the Federal Reserve. In 2004, he delivered the Mundell Fleming Lecture.

Olivier Jeanne is a Professor of Economics at Johns Hopkins University, which he joined in 2008 after ten years at the Research Department of the International Monetary Fund. His research spans an array of applied and theoretical topics in international and domestic macroeconomics: capital flows, exchange rate regimes and currency crises, sovereign debt and defaults, international liquidity, and monetary policy. Olivier Jeanne is a Senior Fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics (Washinton DC), a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), and a Research Fellow at the Center for Economic Policy Research (CEPR). He graduated from Ecole Polytechnique and Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chaussees in France, holds a MsC in Economics from the London School of Economics and a PhD in Economics from Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS, Paris). Before joining Johns Hopkins University he taught economics at Ecole Polytechnique, UC Berkeley and Princeton University. In 2014-15 he is on leave as a Resident Scholar at the Research Department of the IMF.

Gian Maria Milesi-Ferretti is the Deputy Director of the IMF Research Department.

Charles Engel is a professor of economics at the University of Wisconsin, where he moved in 2000. He has previously held positions at the University of Virginia and the University of Washington. He has been an editor of the Journal of International Economics since 2001.

He has conducted research on the behavior of foreign exchange rates and on monetary policy in open economies. He has been a frequent visitor at Federal Reserve Banks in the U.S. and central banks in Europe and Asia.

Linda Tesar is currently on leave from the University of Michigan and is serving as the senior macroeconomist at the Council of Economic Advisers in the Executive Office of the President. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Rochester in 1990 and spend seven years on the faculty at the University of California at Santa Barbara. She joined the faculty at Michigan in 1997 and served as Department Chair from 2007 to 2011. Professor Tesar is a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and has been a visitor in the research departments at the IMF, the Board of Governors, the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis and the Paris School of Economics. Professor Tesar’s research focuses on issues in international finance, with particular interests in the international transmission of business cycles and fiscal policy, the impact of capital market integration, the effects of exchange rate exposure, international tax competition and the European debt crisis. Results of her research have been published in the American Economic Review, the American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, the Journal of International Economics, the Journal of Monetary Economics, the Review of Financial Studies and other academic journals.

Eric van Wincoo is the Robert P. Black Professor of Economics at the University of Virginia and Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He joined the University of Virginia in 2001, following appointments at Boston University (1989-1996) and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York (1996-2001). He has been a co-editor at the Journal of International Economics since 2004. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1989. His research is in the area of international macroeconomics on a wide range of topics such as international capital flows, the determination of exchange rates, international risk sharing and international transmission of business cycles.

Marianne Baxter is a Professor of Economics in the Department of Economics at Boston University. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1984 and began her career at the University of California at Santa Barbara. Subsequently, she held faculty positions at the University of Rochester and the University of Virginia before joining the faculty of Boston University in 2000.

Professor Baxter is a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and has been a consultant to the Research Department of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. She has served as a member of the President’s Advisory Group at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. She has been a visitor in the Research Departments of the International Monetary Fund, the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, and the Federal Reserve Banks of Richmond and Minneapolis.

Professor Baxter’s research focuses on problems in macroeconomics and international finance. Specific interests include international diversification and risk-sharing; international transmission of business cycles; privatization of Social Security; pricing in multi-good, multinational decision problems, and the use of novel statistical methods for modeling the determinants of bilateral trade. Professor Baxter’s research has been published in the American Economic Review, the Journal of Political Economy, the Review of Economics and Statistics and the International Economic Review.

Olivier Blanchard is the IMF Economic Counsellor and Director, Research Department.

A citizen of France, Olivier Blanchard has spent his professional life in Cambridge, U.S. After obtaining his Ph.D in economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1977, he taught at Harvard University, returning to MIT in 1982, where he has been since then. He is the Class of 1941 Professor of Economics, and past Chair of the Economics Department. He is currently on leave from MIT, as Economic Counsellor and Director of the Research Department of the International Monetary Fund.

He is a macroeconomist, who has worked on a wide set of issues, from the role of monetary policy, to the nature of speculative bubbles, to the nature of the labor market and the determinants of unemployment, to transition in former communist countries. In the process, he has worked with numerous countries and international organizations. He is the author of many books and articles, including two textbooks in macroeconomics, one at the graduate level with Stanley Fischer, one at the undergraduate level.

He is a fellow and Council member of the Econometric Society, a past vice president of the American Economic Association, and a member of the American Academy of Sciences.

Mr. Paulo Nogueira Batista, Jr. is a well-known Brazilian economist. Since April 2007, Mr. Nogueira Batista has been Executive Director at the IMF. He represents Brazil, Cape Verde, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Guyana, Haiti, Nicaragua, Panama, Suriname, Timor Leste and Trinidad and Tobago.

Prior to joining the IMF, Mr. Nogueira Batista has held the following positions, among others: Secretary for Economics Affairs, Ministry of Planning; Advisor to the Minister of Finance on External Debt, Ministry of Finance; Head of the Center for Monetary and International Economic Studies, Getúlio Vargas Foundation. He was also a Professor and Researcher of the Getúlio Vargas Foundation in São Paulo.

Mr. Nogueira Batista has participated in numerous conferences and delivered lectures in many different Brazilian cities and abroad. He is the author of four books and a vast list of economic papers and publications.

Mr. Maurice Obstfeld is a member of the Council of Economic Advisers. He is on leave from the University of California, Berkeley, where he is the Class of 1958 Professor of Economics. He joined Berkeley in 1989 as a professor, following appointments at Columbia (1979-1986) and the University of Pennsylvania (1986-1989). He received his Ph.D. in economics from MIT in 1979.

Dr. Obstfeld previously served as an honorary advisor to the Bank of Japan's Institute of Monetary and Economic Studies. He is a Fellow of the Econometric Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Among Dr. Obstfeld's honors are the American Economic Association’s Ely Lecture, Tilburg University’s Tjalling Koopmans Asset Award, and the Kiel Institute’s Bernhard Harms Prize and Lecture. His research focuses on exchange rates, international financial crises, global capital-market integration, and monetary policy in open economies. He is also the co-author of two leading textbooks on international economics.