July 23, 2004
Speaker Biographies
Kevin A. Hassett is director of economic policy studies and a resident scholar at AEI. Before joining AEI, Mr. Hassett was a senior economist at the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System and an associate professor of economics and finance at the Graduate School of Business of Columbia University. He was the chief economic adviser to Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.) during the 2000 primaries. He has also served as a policy consultant to the U.S. Department of the Treasury during the former Bush and Clinton administrations. Mr. Hassett is a member of the Joint Committee on Taxation’s Dynamic Scoring Advisory Panel. He is the author, coauthor, or editor of six books on economics and economic policy. He has published scholarly articles in the American Economic Review, the Economic Journal, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the Review of Economics and Statistics, the Journal of Public Economics, and many other professional journals. His popular writings have been published in the Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic Monthly, USA Today, the Washington Post, and numerous other outlets. His economic commentaries are regularly aired on radio and television, including recent appearances on the Today Show, the CBS Morning Show, Newshour with Jim Lehrer, Hardball, Moneyline, and Power Lunch.
R. Glenn Hubbard, a visiting scholar at AEI, was named dean of Columbia Business School on July 1, 2004. A Columbia faculty member since 1988, he is also the Russell L. Carson Professor of Finance and Economics and was the codirector of Columbia Business School’s Entrepreneurship Program. He has been a visiting professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and Harvard Business School, as well as the University of Chicago. He also held the John M. Olin Fellowship at the National Bureau of Economic Research, at which he remains affiliated with research programs in monetary economics, public economics, corporate finance, and industrial organization. Mr. Hubbard served as deputy assistant secretary of the U.S. Treasury Department for tax policy from 1991 to 1993. He supervised administration efforts on revenue estimates, tax reform, and health policy. From February 2001 until March 2003, he was chairman of the U.S. Council of Economic Advisers under President George W. Bush. His responsibilities included advising the president on economic policy, tax and budget policy, emerging market financial issues, international finance, health care, and environmental policy. While serving as CEA chairman, he also chaired the Economic Policy Committee of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. In addition to writing more than ninety scholarly articles in economics and finance, he is the author of a leading textbook on money and financial markets. His commentaries have appeared in Business Week, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Financial Times, the Washington Post, Nikkei and the Daily Yomiuri, as well as on television (PBS’s Nightly Business Report) and radio (NPR’s Marketplace).
Michael J. Mandel is chief economist at Business Week, where he helps direct the magazine’s coverage of the domestic and global economies. He has been awarded the Gerald Loeb Award, the most prestigious prize in business and financial journalism, for his 1997 articles laying out the shape of the New Economy boom. In 2000, he was named one of the 100 top U.S. business journalists of the twentieth century. In 2002 he received the Economic Journalism Award from the Institute of Political Journalism, given to the writer “who has done the most to shape public opinion by giving the public a better understanding of economic theory and reality.” He taught economics at New York University’s Stern School of Business before joining Business Week in 1989. His previous books include The High Risk Society (1996) and The Coming Internet Depression (2000).
Zanny Minton-Beddoes is The Economist’s economics correspondent in Washington, D.C. She covers the American economy and issues surrounding globalization (trade and capital flows). Before moving to Washington in April 1996, she was The Economist’s emerging-markets correspondent based in London. She joined The Economist in 1994 after spending two years as an economist at the International Monetary Fund (IMF), where she worked on macroeconomic adjustment programs in Africa and the transition economies of Eastern Europe. Before joining the IMF, she worked as an adviser to the Minister of Finance in Poland. Ms. Minton-Beddoes has written extensively about international financial issues, including enlargement of the European Union, the future of the IMF, and economic reform in emerging economies. She has published in Foreign Affairs and Foreign Policy, contributed chapters to several conference volumes, and edited Emerging Asia (Asian Development Bank, 1997), a book on the future of emerging-markets in Asia. In May 1998 she testified before Congress on the introduction of the euro. She is a regular panelist on Tucker Carlson Unfiltered (PBS) and a commentator on Marketplace (NPR). She has also appeared on CNN, the MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour, CNBC, and Public Interest. She is a trustee of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a member of the Research Advisory Board of the Committee for Economic Development.
Robert J. Shapiro is cofounder and managing director of Sonecon, LLC, a private firm that advises U.S. and foreign corporations, governments, and other entities on market conditions and economic policy. He is also a senior fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute, an economic counselor to the Conference Board, an adviser to the Fujitsu Research Institute, director of the Axson-Johnson Foundation in Sweden and the Center for International Political Economy in New York, and an economics columnist for Slate. From 1997 to 2001, Mr. Shapiro was under secretary of commerce for economic affairs. In that position, he oversaw economic policy for the Commerce Department and directed the nation’s major statistical agencies, including the Census Bureau while it planned and conducted the 2000 decennial census. Before that, he was cofounder and vice president of the Progressive Policy Institute, director of economic studies of the Progressive Foundation, and President Bill Clinton’s principal economic adviser during his 1991–1992 campaign. He also was legislative director for Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.) and associate editor of U.S. News & World Report. Mr. Shapiro has served as a fellow of Harvard University and the National Bureau of Economic Research.
