Speaker biographies

Gary Burtless holds the John C. and Nancy D. Whitehead Chair in Economic Studies
at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. He does research on issues associated with public finance, aging, saving, labor markets, income distribution, social insurance, and the behavioral effects of government tax and transfer policy. He is coauthor of Globaphobia: Confronting Fears about Open Trade; Five Years After: The Long Term Effects of Welfare-to-Work Programs, Growth with Equity: Economic Policymaking for the Next Century, and Can America Afford to Grow Old? Paying for Social Security. He also edited and contributed to Aging Societies: The Global Dimension; Does Money Matter? The Effect of School Resources on Student Achievement and Adult Success; A Future of Lousy Jobs? The Changing Structure of U.S. Wages; Work, Health and Income Among the Elderly; and Retirement and Economic Behavior. He is the author of numerous 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 the American Social Security system. Before joining the Brookings Institution in 1981, he 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 Visiting Professor of Public Affairs at the University of Maryland, College Park.

Steven J. Davis is a visiting scholar at AEI, a research associate with the National Bureau of Economic Research, a vice president with CRA International, and the William H. Abbott Professor of International Business and Economics at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business (on leave in 2007), where he has taught since 1986. Davis was previously a visiting professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a former Hoover Institution National Fellow at Stanford University. He has published widely on employment and wage behavior, job loss and worker mobility, the effects of labor market institutions, business dynamics, competition issues, industrial organization, economic fluctuations, and other topics. His research appears in The American Economic Review, the Journal of Political Economy, The Quarterly Journal of Economics, and other leading scholarly journals. He is the recipient of numerous research grants, including several from the U.S. National Science Foundation. Davis has broad experience in commercial consulting activities. In the antitrust area, he has testified and consulted on price discrimination, exclusionary practices, and collusive behavior. In the areas of mortgage lending and consumer finance, he has testified on class certification, liability, and damages. He has also offered testimony and analysis on damages in breach of contract, reasonable royalties, and lost earnings. Previous consulting engagements include matters involving auto leasing, commercial lending, financial institution goodwill, pharmaceuticals, savings institutions, software products and markets, subprime lending, viatical settlements, and workers’ compensation insurance.

Richard Rogerson is the Rondthaler Professor of Economics at Arizona State University (ASU), a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and a fellow of the Econometric Society. He joined the faculty at ASU in 2001 from the University of Pennsylvania, where he was a professor of economics from 1997–2001. He has also held faculty positions at the University of Rochester, New York University, Stanford University, and the University of Minnesota. Rogerson’s teaching and research interests are in the fields of labor economics and macroeconomics. His published work includes papers on business cycle fluctuations, the effects of labor market regulations, financing of public education, and development. He currently serves as co-editor of The American Economic Review and as associate editor of the Review of Economic Dynamics, and previously served as associate editor of the Journal of Monetary Economics, the Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, and the International Economic Review.

View Event Details