Speaker biographies

Jared Bernstein is a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute. His areas of expertise include income and wage inequality, technology’s impact on wages and employment, low-wage labor markets and poverty, minimum wage analysis, and international comparisons. Between 1995 and 1996, he held the post of deputy chief economist at the U.S. Department of Labor. He has published extensively in popular and academic journals, including the American Prospect and Research in Economics and Statistics, and is the co-author of six editions of the book State of Working America (Cornell University Press).

Sheldon Danziger is the Henry J. Meyer Distinguished University Professor of Public Policy at the University of Michigan. Other positions he holds at the university include co-director of the National Poverty Center at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, research professor at the Population Studies Center, and director of the Ford Foundation Program on Poverty and Public Policy. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Transitions to Adulthood. His research focuses on trends in poverty and inequality, and the effects of economic changes, demographic changes, and government social programs on disadvantaged groups. He is the co-author of America Unequal (Harvard University Press & Russell Sage Foundation, 1995) and Detroit Divided (Russell Sage Foundation, 2000), and co-editor of numerous books, including Fighting Poverty: What Works and What Doesn't (Harvard University Press, 1986), Uneven Tides: Rising Inequality in America (Russell Sage Foundation, 1993), Confronting Poverty: Prescriptions for Change (Harvard University Press & the Russell Sage Foundation, 1994), Understanding Poverty (Harvard University Press & the Russell Sage Foundation, 2002), and Working and Poor (Russell Sage Foundation, forthcoming). He is currently conducting research on how the 1996 welfare reform affected the work effort, family income, and material well-being of single mothers.

Steven J. Davis is a visiting scholar at AEI who 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. His area of emphasis is how tax differences in states and countries lead to differences in employment, household work, and leisure time. 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.

Jason Furman is a visiting scholar at New York University's Wagner School and a non-resident senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Previously, Mr. Furman served as special assistant to the president for economic policy during the Clinton administration. Furman has been a visiting lecturer at Columbia and Yale Universities. In addition, he served as a staff economist at the Council of Economic Advisers, senior economic adviser to the chief economist of the World Bank, and director of economic policy for the Kerry-Edwards presidential campaign.

Kevin A. Hassett is the director of economic policy studies and a resident scholar at AEI. He is also a weekly columnist for Bloomberg. 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 Columbia University’s Graduate School of Business. He was an economic adviser to the George W. Bush campaign in the 2004 presidential election and was the chief economic adviser to Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.) during the 2000 primaries. He has 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, co-author, or editor of six books on economics and economic policy, including the AEI book on tax reform, Toward Fundamental Tax Reform (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.

Bruce Meyer is the McCormick Tribune Professor at the Harris School of Public Policy Studies at the University of Chicago. He studies tax policy, welfare policy, unemployment insurance, workers' compensation, minority entrepreneurship, the health-care safety net, and labor supply. His most recent work includes research on the effects of welfare and tax reform on the well-being of single mothers, models and methods to analyze labor supply, and the effects of changes in the health-care safety net. He was a faculty member in the Economics Department at Northwestern University from 1987 through 2004. He has also been a visiting professor at University College London and at Princeton University, a member of the Institute for Research on Poverty, a faculty research fellow and research associate for the National Bureau of Economic Research, and a faculty fellow at the Institute for Policy Research. He is currently a member of the National Academy of Social Insurance. Meyer has also served as an advisor to the U.S. Department of Labor, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, New York State Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance, Human Resources Development Canada, Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation, and Mathematica Policy Research.

Edmund S. Phelps joined the Department of Economics at Columbia in 1971 after several years at the University of Pennsylvania and Yale University. He was named McVickar Professor of Political Economy in 1982. Until May 2000, he served three years as senior advisor to the project Italy in Europe at the Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, Italy. He was a member of the International Panel on Economic Policy of the Observatoire Français des Conjonctures Économiques in Paris in the 1990s, and co-organizer of the annual Villa Mondragone seminar of the University of Rome “Tor Vergata” from 1990 to 2000. He was a charter member of the economic advisory council of the European Bank for reconstruction and development and wrote most of the bank’s Annual Economic Outlook, which was published in September 1993. He has been a consultant at the U.S. Treasury Department, U.S. Senate Finance Committee, and Federal Reserve Board. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences (USA) in 1981 and was made a distinguished fellow of the American Economic Association (AEA) in 2000. He also a formerly served as vice president of the AEA. He is a fellow of the Econometric Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the New York Academy of Sciences, and a past Guggenheim Fellow. In 1985 he was awarded an honorary degree from his alma mater, Amherst College, and in June 2000 he received honorary degrees from the University of Mannheim and the University of Rome "Tor Vergata." During the last forty years he has published extensively in professional journals. His recent books include Structural Slumps: The Modern Equilibrium Theory of Employment, Interest and Assets (Harvard University Press, 1994) and Rewarding Work: How to Restore Participation and Self-Support to Free Enterprise (Harvard University Press, 1997).

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