Committee Members

Robert Feenstra, University of California, Davis, Chair

Robert C. Feenstra is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of California, Davis. He also directs the International Trade and Investment program at the National Bureau of Economic Research, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He is a former editor of the Journal of International Economics and serves on several other editorial boards. Feenstra has published over 80 articles in international trade and 11 books, and has been supported by grants from the National Science Foundation. He specializes in both U.S. and global trade patterns, and has lectured in Europe, China and throughout Asia. Recently, he completed the graduate textbook Advanced International Trade: Theory and Evidence (Princeton University Press, 2004), and an undergraduate textbook jointly with Alan M. Taylor, International Economics (Worth Publishers, 2008). In September 2006 he received the Bernhard-Harms Prize from the Kiel Institute of World Economics, in Germany.

John M. Abowd, Cornell University

John M. Abowd is the Edmund Ezra Day Professor of Economics, Professor of Information Science, Director of Graduate Studies in Economics, and member of the Department of Statistical Science at Cornell University. He is also Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER, Cambridge, MA), Research Affiliate at the Centre de Recherche en Economie et Statistique (CREST, Paris, France), Research Fellow at the Institute for Labor Economics (IZA, Bonn, Germany), and Research Fellow at IAB (Institut für Arbeitsmarkt-und Berufsforschung, Nürnberg, Germany). Abowd is the Director of the Labor Dynamics Institute (LDI) at Cornell. He is Vice President (President in 2014) and Fellow of the Society of Labor Economists. He is Chair (2013) of the Business and Economic Statistics Section and Fellow of the American Statistical Association. He is an Elected Member of the International Statistical Institute. Abowd serves as a Distinguished Senior Research Fellow at the United States Census Bureau (1998-2013). He is also currently serving on the National Academies’ Committee on National Statistics (2010-2013) and on the American Economic Association’s Committee on Economic Statistics. He served as Director of the Cornell Institute for Social and Economic Research (CISER) from 1999 to 2007. Prof. Abowd has taught and done research at Cornell University since 1987, including seven years on the faculty of the Johnson Graduate School of Management. Prof. Abowd is currently the Principal Investigator or Co-Principal Investigator for multiyear grants and contracts from the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Census Bureau and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. He has published articles in the American Economic Review, Econometrica, the Review of Economics and Statistics, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the Journal of the American Statistical Association, the Journal of Business and Economic Statistics, the Journal of Econometrics, and other major economics and statistics journals. Prof. Abowd served on the faculty at Princeton University, the University of Chicago, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before coming to Cornell.

Susanto Basu, Boston College

Susanto Basu is Professor of Economics at Boston College and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Prior to joining BC, he was on the faculty of the University of Michigan from 1992 to 2005. He has held visiting positions at Harvard and Stanford Universities, and has been a visiting scholar at several Federal Reserve banks and central banks around the world. He has received an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Research Fellowship, a National Science Foundation CAREER award, and the University of Michigan's Class of 1923 Memorial Teaching Award. He received his A.B. summa cum laude and his Ph.D. from Harvard University. Basu has published on a variety of topics in macroeconomics and the economics of measurement, including the rigidity of prices and wages, the role of microeconomic frictions in aggregate productivity growth, the measurement of financial sector output, the implications of cyclical fluctuations in productivity, the importance of appropriate technology for growth in developing countries, and using economic theory to measure welfare differences across countries.

Mark Bils, University of Rochester

Mark Bils is a professor of economics at the University of Rochester and a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research.  His research has focused on how wage setting and pricing contribute to business-cycle fluctuations, the importance of cross-country schooling differences to growth, and the importance of new and better consumer products. Some of his recent papers include: 'Comparative Advantage in Cyclical Unemployment', 'Studying Price Markups from Stockout Behavior', 'Measuring Growth from Better and Better Goods', and 'Some Evidence on the Importance of Sticky Prices'.

Karen Dynan, The Brookings Institution

Karen Dynan is vice president, co-director of Economic Studies, and the Robert S. Kerr Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution. Prior to joining Brookings, Dynan served on the staff of the Federal Reserve Board, most recently as a senior adviser. While at the Fed, she played a leadership role in a number of areas, including macroeconomic forecasting, analysis of household and real estate finance conditions, and the policy response to the financial crisis. She also served as a senior economist at the White House Council of Economic Advisers from 2003-2004. Dynan's research focuses on consumer spending and saving decisions, household credit use, household financial security, foreclosure prevention, and the effects of financial innovation on economic dynamics. Her papers have been published in top economics journals, including the American Economic Review, Journal of Political Economy, and Journal of Economic Perspectives. Dynan is on the Advisory Board of the U.S. Financial Diaries and chairs the Board of Overseers of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. Dynan received her Ph.D. from Harvard University and her A.B. from Brown University.

Randall Kroszner, The University of Chicago Booth School of Business

Randall S. Kroszner is the Norman R. Bobins Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business He is also a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. Dr. Kroszner has more than 100 publications on topics including financial regulation, corporate governance, the Great Depression, and monetary policy and has served as editor of the Journal of Law and Economics and associate editor of a number of scholarly journals. His book with Robert J. Shiller, Reforming U.S. Financial Markets: Reflections Before and Beyond Dodd-Frank (MIT Press, 2011), has recently been on the Washington Post's Book World political bestsellers list. Dr. Kroszner served as a Governor of the Federal Reserve System from March 2006 until January 2009, and as a member of the President's Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) from 2001 to 2003. Dr. Kroszner has been a visiting scholar or visiting professor at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the IMF, American Enterprise Institute, London School of Economics, the Stockholm University, the Stockholm School of Economics, the Free University of Berlin, Germany, the University of Chicago Law School, and Yonsei University Korea. He received an Sc.B. (magna cum laude) in applied mathematics-economics (honors) from Brown University in 1984 and an M.A. (1987) and Ph.D. (1990) in economics, from Harvard University.

Michael Palumbo, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System

Michael Palumbo is an Associate Director in the Division of Research and Statistics of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System.  In that role, he is responsible for overseeing research and analysis conducted in the Capital Markets, Flow of Funds, and Short-Term Funding Markets sections.  He contributes to a range of work to support the conduct of monetary policy and the Board’s efforts to monitor and address risks to financial stability.  Prior to joining the Federal Reserve Board staff, he was on the faculty of the Department of Economics at the University of Houston.  He is a member of the American Economic Association and the Conference on Research in Income and Wealth.

Jonathan A. Parker, Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University

Jonathan A. Parker is Professor of Finance at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, and a National Bureau of Economic Research Faculty Research Fellow. Dr. Parker received his Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he was awarded the Robert Solow Endowment Prize for excellence in research and teaching. Prior to his present position at Northwestern, Dr. Parker has held faculty positions at the Princeton University department of economics, where he was affiliated with the Bendheim Center for Finance and the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, at the department of economics at the University of Wisconsin, where he was the Maude P. and Milton J. Shoemaker Fellow, and at the University of Michigan Business School, where he was a Society of Scholars Fellow. Professor Parker currently serves on the Academic Advisory Panel of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, on the Board of Editors of the American Journal of Macroeconomics, and as Associate Editor for the Journal of Money Credit and Banking. He is a member of the American Economic Association and Econometric Society.

Professor Parker teaches both macroeconomics and finance, and his research focuses on macroeconomic risk and stock returns, taxation and consumer spending, national saving and wealth, income risk and consumer demand, and psychology and economics.