Keynote Speakers

AWH Phillips Lecture

Professor Robert J. Gordon

Robert J. Gordon is Stanley G. Harris Professor in the Social Sciences and Professor of Economics at Northwestern University.  He is one of the world's leading experts on and "explosion" of U. S. productivity growth, the stalling of European productivity growth, and the widening of the U. S. income distribution, have been widely cited.  Gordon is author of Macroeconomics, eleventh edition, which has been translated into eight languages, and of The Measurement of Durable Goods Prices, The American Business Cycle, and The Economics of New Goods.  His book of collected essays, Productivity Growth, Inflation, and Unemployment, was published by the Cambridge University Press in 2004.  Gordon did his undergraduate work at Harvard and then attended Oxford University on a Marshall Scholarship.  He received his Ph.D. in 1967 at M.I.T. and taught at Harvard and the University of Chicago before coming to Northwestern in 1973.  He is a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, a Research Fellow of the Centre for Economic Policy Research (London) and the Observatoire Français des Conjunctures Economiques (Paris), and an economic adviser to the Congressional Budget Office and the Bureau of Economic Analysis. 

The Phillips Curve 50 Years On

Professor Sir Clive Granger

Sir Clive Granger obtained his BA in Mathematics at the University of Nottingham in 1955 and his Ph.D. from Nottingham in 1959.  He held a Harkness Fellowship at Princeton in 1960 and positions of Assistant Lecturer, Lecturer, Reader, and Professor in the Departments of Economics and Mathematics at Nottingham from 1956 to 1974.  From 1974 he has been Professor of Economics at the University of California, San Diego.  In 1995 he was Visiting Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford and in 1996 he held the position of Visiting Fellow Commoner at Trinity College, Cambridge.  He has been a Guggenheim Fellow, is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, of the Econometric Society, and of the International Institute of Forecasters.  He was recently named a “Distinguished Fellow of the American Economic Association.”  His interests are largely in time series analysis, forecasting, applied econometrics and finance, and he has  roughly 200 publications or submitted papers, including ten books.  In 2003 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics and in 2004 he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II.  

Stabilisation Policy and Policy Modelling

Professor Stephen Turnovsky

Stephen Turnovsky is the Castor Professor of Economics at the University of Washington. He received his M.A. from VUW and his Ph.D. from Harvard University.  Previously he held positions at the Universities of Pennsylvania, Toronto, Illinois, and ANU.  In 1981 he was elected Fellow of the Econometric Society and was Co-Chair of the Program Committee of the Eighth World Congress of the Econometric Society in 2000.  He was President of the Society of Economic Dynamics and Control from 1982-84 and of the Society for Computational Economics from 2004-2006.  He is a past Editor of the Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, and also serves on several other editorial boards.  His main area of research is macroeconomic dynamics and growth. 

Migration, Diaspora and Human Capital

Professor George Borjas

George J. Borjas is the Robert W. Scrivner Professor of Economics and Social Policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. He is also a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Professor Borjas received his Ph.D. in economics from Columbia University. Professor Borjas was elected a fellow of the Econometric Society in 1998 and a fellow of the Society of Labor Economists in 2004. Professor Borjas was an editor of the Review of Economics and Statistics, and has been on the editorial boards of the Quarterly Journal of Economics and the International Migration Review. Professor Borjas’s research on the economic impact of immigration is widely perceived as playing a central role in the debate over immigration policy in the United States and abroad.  

China: Implications for the World

Professor Wing Thye Woo

Wing Thye Woo holds the New Century Chair in Trade and International Economics at The Brookings Institution.  He is also Professor at the University of California at Davis, Yangtze River Professor at the Central University of Finance and Economics (Beijing), and Director of the East Asia Program within The Earth Institute at Columbia University.  He specialises in the economic issues of East Asia (particularly, China and Indonesia), international financial architecture, sustainable economic growth,  and comparative economics.  In 2001, he helped establish the Asian Economic Panel, a forum of 50 Asia experts that meets biannually; and whose selected proceedings are published in Asian Economic Papers (MIT Press) that he edits.

Institutions and Economic Performance

Professor Avner Greif

Avner Greif is the Bowman Family Endowed Professor in Humanities and Sciences, Professor of Economics, Fellow of Freeman Spogli Institute, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, and the Econometrics Society, and a MacArthur Foundation Fellow. His research interests are in economic history and institutional development. He has published in, for example, the JEH, AER, JPE, APSR, CJIL, among other journals. His main recent publicationa are "Institutions and the Path to the Modern Economy: Lessons from Medieval Trade." 2006 and “Commitment, Coercion, and Markets: The Nature and Dynamics of Institutions Supporting Exchange.” 2005. The Handbook for New Institutional Economics.  

Innovation and Technology

Professor David Audretsch 

David B. Audretsch is the Director of the Max Planck Institute of Economics in Jena, Germany and a Distinguished Professor and Ameritech Chair of Economic Development and Director of the Institute for Development Strategies at Indiana University. He also serves as a Scholar-in-Residence at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation.  Professor Audretsch is ranked as the 21st most cited scholar in economics and business, 1996-2006. He was awarded the 2001 International Award for Entrepreneurship and Small Business Research by the Swedish Foundation for Small Business Research. In 2008, he received an honorary doctorate degree from the University of Augsburg 

Colin Clark Lecture

Professor Stephen Morris

Stephen Morris received his B.A. from Cambridge University and his Ph.D. from Yale University.  He is currently Alexander Stewart 1886 Professor of Economics at Princeton University.  Previously he held positions at the Universities of Pennsylvania and Yale University.   He is a Fellow and Council Member of the Econometric Society, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Council Member of the Game Theory Society and received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2005-2006.  He is currently editor of Econometrica and was previously foreign editor of the Review of Economic Studies, a member of the Board of Editors of the American Economic Review and has served on the editorial boards of several other journals.  His main area of research is game theory, combining foundational work with applications in various applied economic areas. 

Ted Hannan Lecture

Professor Allan Timmermann

Allan Timmermann holds the Atkinson/Epstein chair at the Rady School and is a professor of Economics at UCSD. His current work deals with forecasting methods which he applies to topics in finance and macroeconomics. His past research  includes work on topics in time-series econometrics, including regime switching models, learning in stock markets and predictability of financial returns. Dr Timmermann obtained  his phd from University of Cambridge and he has taught at Birkbeck College, London School of Economics and Stanford.  

Microeconometrics

Professor Martin Browning

Martin Browning is Professor of Economics, University of Oxford; Fellow, Nuffield College; Director, Centre for Applied Microeconometrics, Copenhagen and a Research Fellow of the Institute for Fiscal Studies. He is a Fellow of the Econometric Society. He has been editor or co-editor on several journals.  His research interests are the economics of the family with special emphasis on intrahousehold decision making; demand, consumption and saving; modelling individual behaviour with lots of heterogeneity.  

Public Economics

Professor Joel B Slemrod

Joel Slemrod is Paul W McCracken Collegiate Professor, Professor of Business Economics and Public Policy and Professor of Economics, at the University of Michigan, and Director, Office of Tax Policy Research and Research Associate, National Bureau of Economic Research. He received a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University in 1980, and joined the economics department at the University of Minnesota in 1979.  In 1983-84 he was a National Fellow at the Hoover Institution and in 1984-85 he was the senior staff economist for tax policy at the President’s Council of Economic Advisers.  He has written widely on taxation, and is co-author with Jon Bakija of "Taxing Ourselves:  A Citizen’s Guide to the Debate over Taxes", now in its fourth edition.  

Econometric Society Presidential Address

Professor Torsten Persson

Torsten Persson is Director of the IIES at Stockholm University, Centennial Professor at the London School of Economics, and has held visiting positions at leading universities as Harvard, Princeton and Berkeley. Persson is the 2008 President of the Econometric Society, and was President of the European Economic Association in 2003. His scientific prizes include  the 1997 Yrjö Jahnsson Medal, given biannually to “the best young economist in Europe”. Persson’s work has spanned different areas, but he is most well-known for his articles and books on political economics. His current research focuses on development, civil war, and climate change.