Speaker Biographies

Steven J. Davis is a visiting scholar at AEI, studying how tax differences in states and countries lead to differences in employment, household work, and leisure time. Davis also studies the effect of taxes on work activity, the creation and loss of jobs, the employment impact of wage-setting rules, and other labor market issues. He is a professor of international business and economics at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He previously taught at Brown University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and served as a consultant and researcher at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago.

Kevin A. Hassett is a resident scholar and the director of economic policy studies 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 an economic adviser to the Bush campaign in the 2004 presidential election and was the chief economic adviser to Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.) during the 2000 presidential primaries. He has also served as a policy consultant to the U.S. Department of the Treasury during both 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, including the Toward Fundamental Tax Reform (AEI Press, 2005). 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, CBS’s Morning Show, Newshour with Jim Lehrer, Hardball, Moneyline, and Power Lunch.

Erik Hurst is an associate professor of economics and the John Huizinga Faculty Fellow at the University of Chicago's Graduate School of Business. Professor Hurst received his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Michigan in 1999. Professor Hurst's research focuses on many aspects of household financial behavior, including work on black/white saving differentials, bankruptcy reform, the correlation in saving propensities between parents and their children, the effects of recent welfare reform on the savings of less-educated single mothers, the adequacy of retirement savings, the effects of household mortgage refinancing on consumption spending, the effect of social security laws on household's credit card borrowing, how households allocate time towards shopping and home production to reduce their consumption expenditures, racial discrimination in vehicle lending, and the effects of borrowing constraints on household small business formation. His research has been published in top academic journals, including the Journal of Political Economy, American Economic Review, The Review of Economics and Statistics, and the Brookings Papers on Economic Activity. Currently Professor Hurst is working on documenting the extent to which household leisure time has evolved over the last five decades and the importance of signaling status in household consumption and portfolio decisions.

Valerie A. Ramey received her B.A. in Economics and Spanish from the University of Arizona, graduating summa cum laude, and went on to earn a Ph.D. in Economics from Stanford University. She is currently a professor of economics at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, and chair of the UCSD Institute for Applied Economics. She has served as co-editor of The American Economic Review and as a member of the National Science Foundation Advisory Panel. Professor Ramey has published numerous scholarly articles on the role of inventories in the business cycle, trends in wage inequality, the effects of monetary and fiscal policy, and the impact of volatility on growth. She has received a number of research grants from the National Science Foundation, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and the Bradley Foundation.