EVENTS

Date:	Friday, November 13, 2009
Time:	12:15 PM -- 2:00 PM
Location:	Wohlstetter Conference Center, Twelfth Floor, AEI 1150 Seventeenth Street, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036

Speaker biographies

Andrew G. Biggs is a resident scholar at AEI, specializing in Social Security and retirement policy. He previously served as the principal deputy commissioner of the Social Security Administration (SSA), where he oversaw SSA's policy research efforts and led the agency's participation in the Social Security Trustees working group. In 2005, he worked on Social Security reform at the White House National Economic Council, and in 2001, he was on the staff of the President's Commission to Strengthen Social Security. Mr. Biggs has written about Social Security reform for numerous publications including the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and the Christian Science Monitor. He is also the author of AEI's Retirement Policy Outlook series.

Estelle James specializes in pension reform and is currently a consultant for the World Bank and USAID, among others. She was formerly lead economist at the World Bank and director of their Pension Flagship Course. While at the World Bank, she concentrated on public-private sector pension interactions worldwide and was the principal author of Averting the Old Age Crisis: Policies to Protect the Old and Promote Growth (World Bank, 1994). Ms. James was a member of President Bush's Commission to Strengthen Social Security. Before joining the World Bank in 1991, she was a professor of economics at the State University of New York, Stony Brook.

Jagadeesh Gokhale is a Cato Institute senior fellow and an expert on entitlement reform, labor productivity and compensation, U.S. fiscal policy, and the impact of fiscal policy on future generations. He works with Cato's Project on Social Security Choice to develop reforms for programs such as Social Security and Medicare. Mr. Gokhale served in 2002 as a consultant to the U.S. Department of the Treasury and in 2003 as a visiting scholar at AEI. He was the senior economic adviser to the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland from 1990 to 2003. His most recent book, Fiscal and Generational Imbalances: New Budget Measures for New Budget Priorities, coauthored with Kent Smetters, drew widespread attention when it was published by AEI in 2003 after the Bush administration declined to include it in the federal budget document for which it had been commissioned. Mr. Gokhale has published several papers in top-tier journals such as the American Economic Review, Journal of Economic Perspectives, Quarterly Journal of Economics, Review of Economics and Statistics, and Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, and in publications of the National Bureau of Economic Research and the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland.