Biographies
Morning Panel
Prakash Loungani, IMF, co-authored report for joint IMF-ILO report “The Challenges of Growth, Employment and Social Cohesion” (presented in Oslo), [pdf]. He is currently an Advisor in the Research Department of the International Monetary Fund. He is also an adjunct professor of economics at Vanderbilt University's Owen School of Management, and the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). His research interests include: assessment of macroeconomic forecasting performance; understanding trade linkages among nations and regions; and modeling the impact of oil prices on the macroeconomy.Kenneth Scheve is Professor of Political Science and Co-Director of the Leitner Program in International & Comparative Political Economy at Yale University where he teaches courses in political economy and quantitative methods and serves as the Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Political Science. His research interests are in international and comparative political economy and comparative political behavior. His current research projects include studying the mass politics of globalization and the determinants of income inequality and welfare state development. His research has been published in numerous academic journals including the American Journal of Political Science, the American Political Science Review, the British Journal of Political Science, Economics & Politics, European Union Politics, International Organization, the Journal of International Economics, the Journal of Theoretical Politics, the Quarterly Journal of Political Science, The Review of Economics and Statistics, and World Politics. He is the author, with Matthew Slaughter, of the book entitled, Globalization and the Perceptions of American Workers (Institute for International Economics, 2001) examining American public opinion about the liberalization of trade, immigration, and foreign direct investment policies. He has recently been a fellow-in-residence at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences (2005-2006) and has previously been a visiting scholar at the Bank of England and London School of Economics. Professor Scheve received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 2000.
Phillip L. Swagel is Professor in International Economic Policy at the Maryland School of Public Policy. He directs the Thomas Schelling Distinguished Visitor Series, which brings to the university eminent policy makers and leading academics who have made sustained contributions to public policy. He comes to Maryland School of Public Policy from the McDonough School of Business at Georgetown University, where he served as a visiting professor teaching classes on the relationship between financial markets and the economy. Swagel was also the director of the McDonough School's Center for Financial Institutions, Policy, and Governance. He is a non-resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. Swagel was Assistant Secretary for Economic Policy at the Treasury Department from December 2006 to January 2009. In that position, he advised Secretary Paulson on all aspects of economic policy. He served as a member of the TARP investment committee, and was responsible for analysis on issues including housing, financial markets, healthcare, pensions, and macroeconomic forecasts. Swagel was previously chief of staff and a senior economist at the White House Council of Economic Advisers, and was an economist at the IMF and the Federal Reserve Board. He has taught courses on domestic and international economics at Northwestern University and the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. He received a bachelor's degree in economics from Princeton University in 1987 and a PhD in economics from Harvard University in 1993.
Robert Valletta is a Research Advisor at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, where he began working in 1995. Prior to that, he was an Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of California, Irvine. In addition, he spent a year (2000-2001) as a consultant at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in Paris, France. He holds an A.B. degree (1982) from the University of California, Berkeley, and a Ph.D (1987) from Harvard University, both in economics. Dr. Valletta’s research is in the areas of labor economics and applied econometrics. His core research agenda has focused on topics such as job mobility and job security, unemployment, income inequality and poverty (including cross-national comparisons), and the effects of employer-provided health insurance on labor market outcomes. His published work has appeared in general interest journals such as The Review of Economics and Statistics, leading U.S. journals in labor economics (e.g., Journal of Labor Economics, Industrial and Labor Relations Review), and in European journals including Economica and the Review of Income and Wealth.
Tim Smeeding is Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor of Public Affairs at the La Follette School of Public Affairs and director of the Institute for Research on Poverty. His research interests include the economics of public policy, especially social policy and at-risk populations; national and cross-national comparisons of income and wealth inequality; poverty; social policy; and social mobility. He is the founder and director emeritus of the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS), which he began in 1983. Smeeding’s publications include the book Poor Kids in a Rich Country: America's Children in Comparative Perspective, co-authored with Lee Rainwater (Russell Sage Foundation, 2003), which is based on LIS data and places child poverty in the United States in an international context. Another of his books, The Future of the Family, co-edited by Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Lee Rainwater (Russell Sage Foundation, 2004; paperback ed., 2006), brings together the top scholars of family policy to take stock of the state of the family in the United States and address the ways in which public policy affects the family and vice versa. Immigration and the Transformation of Europe, co-edited with Craig Parsons (Cambridge University Press, 2006), examines a new kind of historic transformation underway in 21st-century Europe, in-flows of non-European people. Smeeding is also co-editor of the Oxford University Press' Handbook of Economic Inequality (2009) and co-author of Wealth and Welfare States: Is America a Laggard or Leader? (Oxford University Press, 2010).
Academic Panels
Thomas DeLeire is an associate professor of public affairs and population health sciences. His research focuses on labor and health economics. His recent work is on economic mobility, family structure, choice of occupation, health insurance spending, and the well-being of poor households. In other work, he has examined the impact of overtime regulations on hours of work, the effect of the Americans with Disabilities Act on the employment of disabled citizens, the extent to which disabled workers face wage discrimination by employers, and the role that tax-favored savings accounts play in increasing national savings. DeLeire has twice taken leave from his university appointments to work in government. From 2005 to 2007, DeLeire was a senior analyst at the Congressional Budget Office and from 2002 to 2003, DeLeire was senior economist for labor, health, and education for the Council of Economic Advisers. He previously taught at Michigan State University, the University of Chicago, and Harvard University. He received his A.B. from Princeton University in 1990 and his Ph.D. in economics from Stanford University in 1997.Carolyn Heinrich is the director of the La Follette School of Public Affairs, professor of public affairs and affiliated professor of economics, and a Regina Loughlin Scholar. Her research focuses on social welfare policy, public management and performance management, and econometric methods for social-program evaluation. She works directly in her research with governments at all levels, including with the federal government on evaluations of workforce development programs, with states on their social welfare and child support programs, school districts in the evaluation of supplemental educational services and other educational interventions, and governments such as Brazil and South Africa on their social and human capital development programs. Other ongoing projects involve the study of labor market intermediaries and labor market outcomes for low-skilled and disadvantaged workers, health-care reform provisions, policy factors that support effective provision of substance abuse treatment services, and conditional cash transfers and related poverty-reduction interventions. Professor Heinrich co-edited the book, Making the Work-Based Safety Net Work Better: Forward-Looking Policies to Help Low-Income Families (Russell Sage Foundation, 2009) with John Karl Scholz. She is also a co-author of several books on the empirical study of governance and public management, including Improving Governance: A New Logic for Empirical Research and Governance and Performance: New Perspectives. Recent articles have appeared in the Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, Health Services Research, Southern Economic Journal, World Development, Journal of Labor Economics, The American Review of Public Administration, Review of Economics and Statistics, Journal of Labor Research, Journal of Drug Issues, Journal of Human Resources, Public Administration Review, American Journal of Evaluation and other journals. She is a founding board member of the Public Management Research Association and served on the Policy Council of the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management from 2004-2007 and as the editor of the Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory from January 2005 through December 2008. In 2004, Professor Heinrich received the David N. Kershaw Award for distinguished contributions to the field of public policy analysis and management by a person under age 40. Prior to her appointment at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2003, Professor Heinrich was an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and held an academic research appointment at the University of Chicago. She received her doctorate in public policy studies from the University of Chicago.
Rasmus Lentz is associate professor of Economics in the Department of Economics at the University of Wisconsin. He is also a faculty research fellow of the National Bureau of Economic Research, and associate editor of Labor Economics. He has published in Econometrica, the International Economic Review and Journal of Labor Economics. Prior to coming to UW, he taught at Boston University.
Kenneth Troske is Director of the Center for Business and Economic Research, Chair of the Economics Department and William B. Sturgill Professor of Economics at the University of Kentucky as well as a Research Fellow with the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) in Bonn, Germany. Prior to moving to Kentucky Dr. Troske was an Assistant and an Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri. He received his Ph.D. in economics in 1992 from the University of Chicago and his undergraduate degree in economics from the University of Washington in 1984. His primary research areas are labor and human resource economics. Dr. Troske has authored a number of widely-known papers utilizing employer-employee matched data on topics such as productivity, technology, and discrimination. His most recent work has focused on evaluating various aspects of the Workforce Development System in the U.S., the role of human capital in promoting the economic growth of a region and the impact of tax incentives on the creation of jobs in a region. His papers have appeared in many leading journals in economics including the Quarterly Journal of Economics, Journal of Labor Economics, Journal of Human Resources, Review of Economics and Statistics, and the American Economic Review.
David Weimer is professor of political science and public affairs. His research focuses broadly on policy craft, institutional design, and health policy. He is working on several research projects in health policy: the role of report cards in promoting improved quality of care, the social and fiscal net benefits of screening for Alzheimer’s disease, the organ transplant network as a model for medical governance, and the proper measurement of social costs associated with the regulation of addictive goods like tobacco. His other research addresses issues in energy security, natural resource policy, education, and research methods. Professor Weimer is the author of Medical Governance: Values, Expertise, and Interests in Organ Transplantation. He is co-author of Organizational Report Cards and Policy Analysis: Concepts and Practice (4th edition), and Cost-Benefit Analysis (3rd edition). His edited volumes include Institutional Design, The Political Economy of Property Rights and Investing in the Disadvantaged: Assessing the Benefits and Costs of Social Policies. Recent articles have appeared in the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, Public Administration Review, American Journal of Public Health, Health Services Research, and Political Analysis. In 2006 Professor Weimer served as president of the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management. He received his doctorate in public policy from the University of California, Berkeley.
Organizers
Menzie D. Chinn is Professor of Public Affairs and Economics at the University of Wisconsin’s Robert M. La Follette School of Public Affairs. His research examines macroeconomic interactions between countries using empirical methods. One important area of research focuses on the behavior of exchange rates. He has published in the Journal of International Economics, Journal of International Money and Finance, Review of International Economics, and Oxford Economic Papers. He is an associate editor of the Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, and was formerly an associate editor at the Journal of International Economics and the Review of International Economics. In 2000-2001, Professor Chinn served as Senior Staff Economist for International Finance on the President’s Council of Economic Advisors. He is currently a Research Fellow in the International Finance and Macroeconomics Program of the National Bureau of Economic Research, and has been a visiting scholar at the International Monetary Fund, the Congressional Budget Office and the Federal Reserve Board. With Jeffrey Frieden, he is coauthor of Lost Decades: The Making of America’s Debt Crisis and the Long Recovery (forthcoming, Norton). He is also a contributor to Econbrowser, a weblog on macroeconomic issues. Prior to his appointment at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 2003, Professor Chinn taught at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He received his doctorate in Economics from the University of California, Berkeley, and his AB from Harvard University. Mark Copelovitch is Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science and the Robert M. La Follette School of Public Affairs at the University of Wisconsin - Madison. Professor Copelovitch studies and teaches international political economy, with a focus on global financial governance, the effects of international capital flows on national economic policies, and the political economy of exchange rates and financial crises. He is the author of The International Monetary Fund in the Global Economy: Banks, Bonds, and Bailouts (Cambridge University Press, 2010), as well as articles in the Journal of Politics and International Studies Quarterly. Professor Copelovitch is a graduate of Yale University and Harvard University, where he received his Ph.D. in 2005. Before joining the Wisconsin faculty, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance at Princeton University.Back to conference website
4/19/2011