Speaker biographies

David E. Weinstein is the Carl S. Shoup Professor of the Japanese Economy at Columbia at Columbia University. He is also the associate director of research at the Center for Japanese Economy and Business at Columbia, a research associate and the director of the Japan Project at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Previously, Mr. Weinstein was a senior economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and a consultant for the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco and Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve. Prior to joining the Columbia faculty, Mr. Weinstein was the Sanford R. Robertson Associate Professor of Business Administration at the School of Business Administration at the University of Michigan as well as an associate professor of economics at Harvard University. He also served on the Council of Economic Advisers from 1989–90. His teaching and research interests include international economics, macroeconomics, corporate finance, the Japanese economy, and industrial policy.

Henry Olsen is vice president and director of the National Research Initiative (NRI). He disseminates and publicizes the Institute’s work to the academic community; works with AEI’s visiting, adjunct, and NRI research fellows; commissions and supervises NRI projects; and oversees the production of NRI publications. Mr. Olsen previously served as vice president for programs at the Manhattan Institute and as a judicial clerk to the chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit Danny J. Boggs.

Gary Burtless holds the John C. and Nancy D. Whitehead Chair in Economic Studies at the Brookings Institution. He researches public finance, aging, saving, labor markets, income distribution, social insurance, and the behavioral effects of government tax and transfer policy. Mr. Burtless is the author of numerous books, including Globaphobia: Confronting Fears about Open Trade (Brookings Institution Press, 1998) and Five Years After: The Long Term Effects of Welfare-to-Work Programs (Russell Sage Foundation, 1995). He has also written scholarly and popular articles on the economic effects of Social Security, public welfare, unemployment insurance, and taxes. His recent research has focused on sources of growing wage and income inequality in the United States, the influence of international trade on income inequality, the job market prospects of public aid recipients, reform of social insurance in developing countries and formerly socialist economies, and the implications of privatizing Social Security. Before coming to Brookings in 1981, Mr. Burtless served as an economist in the policy and evaluation offices of the secretary of labor and the secretary of health, education, and welfare. In 1993 he was a visiting professor of public affairs at the University of Maryland, College Park.

David Johnson is the chief of the Housing and Household Economic Statistics Division at the U.S. Census Bureau. The division compiles and analyzes data on the socioeconomic characteristics of households, families, and individuals, including the homeownership rates, income, poverty, and health insurance statistics, and the current effort to reengineer the Survey of Income and Program Participation. Before joining the Census Bureau, he was the assistant commissioner for consumer prices and price indexes at the U.S. Department of Labor Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). He began his federal career at BLS, where he started in 1990 as a research economist in the division of price and index number research, and eventually became the division chief. He has written several journal articles on the measure of consumption inequality and mobility, the effects of tax rebates, equivalence scale estimation, poverty measurement, specification testing, and the well-being of children. He has published articles in the American Economic Review, the Review of Economics and Statistics, the Review of Income and Wealth, and the Monthly Labor Review. He is also an adjunct faculty member at the Georgetown Public Policy Program.

Douglas J. Besharov is the Joseph J. and Violet Jacobs Scholar in Social Welfare Studies at AEI, a professor at the University of Maryland School of Public Policy, and director of the Welfare Reform Academy. Between 1975 and 1979, he was the first director of the U.S. National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect. His many books include Recognizing Child Abuse: A Guide for the Concerned (Simon and Schuster, 1990), Rethinking WIC: An Evaluation of the Women, Infants, and Children Program (AEI Press, 2001), and Family and Child Well-Being after Welfare Reform (Transaction, 2003). Mr. Besharov is currently the president of the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.

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