Speaker biographies

Steven J. Davis is a visiting scholar at AEI and the William H. Abbott Professor of International Business and Economics at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business. He is also a research associate with the National Bureau of Economic Research and has previously taught at Brown University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is an applied economist with broad interests in labor markets, business dynamics, competition, and public policy. His recent research addresses hiring behavior in labor markets, tax effects on work activity, electricity pricing to industrial customers, the climate for business development in Puerto Rico, the performance of the Swedish economy, costs and benefits of the Iraq war, and the volatility of publicly traded and privately held businesses in the United States. He currently serves on a National Research Council panel on Measuring Business Formation, Dynamics and Performance. On leave from the University of Chicago in 2007, Davis is a vice president at CRA International, an economics and business consultancy firm.

Gordon H. Hanson is the director of the Center on Pacific Economies and professor of economics at University of California–San Diego (UCSD), where he holds faculty positions in the Graduate School of International Relations and Pacific Studies and the Department of Economics. Professor Hanson is also a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and coeditor of the Journal of Development Economics. Prior to joining UCSD in 2001, he was on the economics faculty at the University of Michigan from 1998–2001 and at the University of Texas from 1992–98. Professor Hanson’s current research examines the international migration of high-skilled labor, the causes of Mexican migration to the United States, the consequences of immigration on labor-market outcomes for African-Americans, the relationship between business cycles and foreign outsourcing, and international trade in motion pictures. He recently studied the impact of globalization on wages, the origins of political opposition to immigration, and the implications of China’s growth for the export performance of Mexico and other developing countries. His most recent book is Why Does Immigration Divide America? Public Finance and Political Opposition to Open Borders (Institute for International Economics, 2005).

L. Alan Winters is director of the Development Research Group of the World Bank. He previously in the Bank as division chief and research manager and economist. He is currently on leave from the University of Sussex, where he is a professor of economics. He is a research fellow and former program director of the Centre for Economic Policy Research in London, and previously worked at the Universities of Cambridge, Bristol, Wales, and Birmingham. He has been editor of the World Bank Economic Review, associate editor of the Economic Journal, and serves on numerous editorial boards. He has also advised the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, Department for International Development, the Commonwealth Secretariat, the European Commission, the European Parliament, United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, the World Trade Organization, and the Inter-American Development Bank. Winters is one of the world’s leading specialists on the empirical and policy analyses of international trade and also recently researched migration and the brain drain. He has published over 200 books and articles in areas such as regional trading arrangements, nontariff barriers, European integration, transition economies’ trade, international labor mobility, agricultural protection, trade and poverty, and the world trading system. He has also published on small economies, global warming, pricing behavior, and econometrics.

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