Speaker biographies
Steven J. Davis is a visiting scholar at AEI who studies how tax differences in states and countries lead to differences in employment, household work, and leisure time. Other areas of interest include 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.
Christopher L. Foote is a senior economist in the research department at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. From 1987 to 1989, he worked as a newspaper reporter in Harrisonburg, Virginia. From 1996 to 2002, Mr. Foote taught at Harvard University’s department of economics, where he also served as director of undergraduate studies. In July 2002, he accepted a position as senior staff economist with the Council of Economic Advisers, later becoming its chief economist in February 2003. From May 2003 to September 2003, he served as an economic adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad, Iraq, returning briefly to Iraq in January and February of 2004. He joined the Boston Federal Reserve Bank in October 2003.
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.
Alan B. Krueger is the Bendheim Professor of Economics and Public Affairs at Princeton University. He has published widely on the economics of education, labor economics, the economics of terrorism, and environmental economics. He is the founding director of the Princeton University Survey Research Center and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). He is a member of the executive committee of the American Economic Association, a member of the editorial board of Science, and was editor of the Journal of Economic Perspectives from 1996 to 2002. In 1994–95 he served as chief economist at the U.S. Department of Labor. He was a Sloan Fellow in economics and an NBER Olin Fellow, and was awarded the Kershaw Prize and the Mahalanobis Memorial Medal. He is also a fellow of the Econometric Society and of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.
David Loughran is an economist at the RAND Corporation and professor of economics at the Pardee RAND Graduate School. His research focuses on applied topics in labor economics and the economics of the family. Loughran’s recent research in the area of labor economics includes studies of how activation affects the employment and earnings of reservists and the economic health of their communities, and the determinants of labor supply among Social Security beneficiaries and other elderly workers. In research on the family, Loughran has investigated how female age at first marriage responded to increases in male wage inequality during the 1970s and 1980s, how age at first marriage impacts career development, and how parental investment responds to birth weight. Loughran’s ongoing research includes an examination of how well women anticipate declines in fertility at later ages, a study of the relative riskiness of older drivers, and an assessment of disability retirement among public safety workers in California.
Phillip L. Swagel is a resident scholar at AEI. Before joining AEI in March 2005, he was the chief of staff of the White House Council of Economic Advisers. He has previously been a senior economist at the council, a visiting assistant professor at Northwestern University, and an economist at the Federal Reserve Board and the International Monetary Fund. He has written on international trade policy, the political economy of the welfare state, and most recently on Social Security.
Scott Wallsten is a senior fellow at the AEI-Brookings Joint Center for Regulatory Studies and a resident scholar at AEI. Before joining the Joint Center, he had been an economist at the World Bank, a scholar at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, and a staff economist on the President’s Council of Economic Advisers. His interests include industrial organization and public policy, and his research has focused on regulation, privatization, competition, and science and technology policy. His work has been published in journals including the RAND Journal of Economics, the Journal of Economic History, the Journal of Industrial Economics, the Journal of Regulatory Economics, Regulation, and Nature magazine, as well as the Washington Post, the Financial Times, and other newspapers throughout the world.
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