Event Agenda

• 2:00 - 2:05

  Welcome

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    Jason Furman

    Chairman

    The White House Council of Economic Advisors

    Former Senior Fellow & Director of the Hamilton Project

    The Brookings Institution

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    Jason Furman

    Jason Furman was confirmed by the Senate on August 1, 2013 as the 28th Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers. In this role, he serves as President Obama’s Chief Economist and a Member of the Cabinet. Furman has served the President since the beginning of the Administration, previously holding the position of Principal Deputy Director of the National Economic Council and Assistant to the President. Immediately prior to the Administration, Furman was Economic Policy Director for the President’s campaign in 2008 and a member of the Presidential Transition Team. Furman held a variety of posts in public policy and research before his work with President Obama. In public policy, Furman worked at both the Council of Economic Advisers and National Economic Council during the Clinton administration and also at the World Bank. In research, Furman was a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and also has served in visiting positions at various universities, including NYU’s Wagner Graduate School of Public Policy. Furman has conducted research in a wide range of areas, such as fiscal policy, tax policy, health economics, Social Security, and domestic and international macroeconomics. In addition to numerous articles in scholarly journals and periodicals, Furman is the editor of two books on economic policy. Furman holds a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University.

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  • 

    David Wessel

    Director, The Hutchins Center on Fiscal and Monetary Policy

    Senior Fellow, Economic Studies

    @davidmwessel

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• 2:05 - 2:20

  Opening Remarks

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    Roger Porter

    IBM Professor of Business and Government

    Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government

    The John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University

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    Roger Porter

    Roger B. Porter is IBM Professor of Business and Government. Joining the Kennedy School faculty in 1977, he has served for more than a decade in senior economic policy positions in the White House, most recently as Assistant to the President for Economic and Domestic Policy from 1989 to 1993. He served as Director of the White House Office of Policy Development in the Reagan Administration and as Executive Secretary of the President’s Economic Policy Board during the Ford Administration. He is the author of several books on economic policy, including Presidential Decision Making and Efficiency, Equity and Legitimacy: The Multilateral Trading System at the Millennium. An alumnus of Brigham Young University, Porter was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University, where he received his BPhil degree. He was a White House Fellow from 1974 to 1975 and received his MA and PhD degrees from Harvard University.

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• 2:20 - 3:05

  Panel 1: The CEA in Moments of Crisis

  • Moderator

    

    David Wessel

    Director, The Hutchins Center on Fiscal and Monetary Policy

    Senior Fellow, Economic Studies

    @davidmwessel

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  • 

    Alan Greenspan

    President

    Greenspan Associates, LLC

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    Alan Greenspan

    In addition to serving as chairman of the Federal Reserve from 1987 to 2006, Alan Greenspan led President Ford’s Council of Economic Advisors as chair from 1974 to 1977. He received a B.S. (summa cum laude), M.A. and Ph.D. from New York University and honorary degrees from Harvard, Yale, Pennsylvania, Notre Dame, Leuven and Edinburgh universities. He has also received numerous awards, including the Commandeur de la Legion d’Honneur from France, Knight Commander of the British Empire and the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the United States’ highest civilian award.

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  • 

    Austan Goolsbee

    Robert P. Gwinn Professor of Economics

    The Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago

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    Austan Goolsbee

    Austan D. Goolsbee is the Robert P. Gwinn Professor of Economics. 
    
    He previously served in Washington as the Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers and a member of the President's cabinet. His research has earned him recognition as a Fulbright Scholar and an Alfred P. Sloan fellow. In prior years he was named one of the 100 Global Leaders for Tomorrow by the World Economic Forum, and one of the six "Gurus of the Future" by the Financial Times. His ability to explain economics clearly has made Goolsbee popular in the media. Jon Stewart describes him as "Eliot Ness meets Milton Friedman" and he has twice been named as a "star" professor by BusinessWeek's "Guide to the Best Business Schools." 
    
    Goolsbee serves on the Economic Advisory Panel to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and has previously served on the Panel of Economic Advisors to the Congressional Budget Office, the U.S. Census Advisory Commission and as a special consultant for Internet Policy to the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice. He joined Chicago Booth in 1995.

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  • 

    Glenn Hubbard

    Dean & Russell L. Carson Professor of Finance and Economics

    Columbia Business School

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    Glenn Hubbard

    Glenn Hubbard is dean and Russell L. Carson Professor of Finance and Economics at Columbia Business School.  Hubbard received his BA and BS degrees summa cum laude from the University of Central Florida and also holds AM and PhD degrees in economics from Harvard University.

    In addition to writing more than 100 scholarly articles in economics and finance, Glenn is the author of three popular textbooks, as well as co-author of The Aid Trap: Hard Truths About Ending Poverty, Balance: The Economics of Great Powers From Ancient Rome to Modern America, and Healthy, Wealthy, and Wise: Five Steps to a Better Health Care System.  His commentaries appear in Business Week, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Financial Times, the Washington Post, Nikkei, and the Daily Yomiuri, as well as on television and radio.

    From 2001 until 2003, he was chairman of the U.S. Council of Economic Advisers.  In the corporate sector, he is on the boards of ADP, BlackRock Closed-End Funds, and MetLife.

    Hubbard is co-chair of the Committee on Capital Markets Regulation; he is a past Chair of the Economic Club of New York and a past co-chair of the Study Group on Corporate Boards.

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    Alan Krueger

    Bendheim Professor of Economics and Public Affairs

    Princeton University

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    Alan Krueger

    Alan Krueger has published widely on the economics of education, terrorism, unemployment, labor demand, income distribution, social insurance, labor market regulation and environmental economics. Since 1987 he has held a joint appointment in the Economics Department and Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University. He is the founding Director of the Princeton University Survey Research Center.
    
    Professor Krueger served as Chairman of President Barack Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers and a Member of his Cabinet from November 2011 to August 2013.  He also served as Assistant Secretary for Economic Policy and Chief Economist of the U.S. Department of the Treasury in 2009-10, and as Chief Economist at the U.S. Department of Labor in 1994-95.
    
    He is the author of “What Makes A Terrorist: Economics and the Roots of Terrorism and Education Matters: A Selection of Essays on Education”, co-author of “Myth and Measurement: The New Economics of the Minimum Wage”, and co-author of “Inequality in America: What Role for Human Capital Policies?” He has been a member of the Board of Directors of the Russell Sage Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, and the American Institutes for Research, as well as a member of the editorial board of Science (2001-09), editor of the Journal of Economic Perspectives (1996-2002) and co-editor of the Journal of the European Economic Association (2003-05).
    
    He has been a member of the Executive Committee of the American Economic Association (2005-07) and International Economic Association, and Chief Economist for the National Council on Economic Education (2003-09).

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• 3:05 - 3:15

  Break

• 3:15 - 4:00

  Panel 2: The CEA and Policymaking

  • Moderator

    

    Ruth Marcus

    Columnist

    The Washington Post

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    Ruth Marcus

    Ruth Marcus is a columnist for The Post, specializing in American politics and domestic policy. Marcus has been with The Post since 1984. She joined the national staff in 1986, covering campaign finance, the Justice Department, the Supreme Court and the White House. From 1999 through 2002, she served as deputy national editor, supervising reporters who covered money and politics, Congress, the Supreme Court, and other national issues. She joined the editorial board in 2003 and began writing a regular column in 2006. A graduate of Yale College and Harvard Law School, she was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 2007.

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  • 

    Katharine Abraham

    Director

    Maryland Center for Economics and Policy

    Professor

    The University of Maryland

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    Katharine Abraham

    Katharine G. Abraham is Professor of Economics and Survey Methodology at the University of Maryland. Her published research includes papers on the work and retirement decisions of older Americans; how government policies affect employers’ choices concerning employment and hours over the business cycle; the effects of financial aid on the decision to attend college; discrepancies in alternative measures of employment, wages and hours; and the measurement of economic activity. She served as Commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics from 1993 through 2001 and as a Member of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers from 2011 through 2013. She is a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research and an elected Fellow of the American Statistical Association and of the Society of Labor Economists. Abraham received her Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University and her B.S. in economics from Iowa State University.

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  • 

    Martin Neil Baily

    Senior Fellow, Economic Studies

    Bernard L. Schwartz Chair in Economic Policy Development

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    Martin Feldstein

    George F. Baker Professor of Economics

    Harvard University

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    Martin Feldstein

    Martin Feldstein is the George F. Baker Professor of Economics at Harvard University and President Emeritus of the National Bureau of Economic Research. He served as President and CEO of the NBER from 1977-82 and 1984-2008. He continues as a Research Associate of the NBER. The NBER is a private, nonprofit research organization that has specialized for nearly 100 years in producing nonpartisan studies of the American economy.
    
    From 1982 through 1984, Martin Feldstein was Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers and President Reagan's chief economic adviser. He served as President of the American Economic Association in 2004. In 2006, President Bush appointed him to be a member of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. In 2009, President Obama appointed him to be a member of the President's Economic Recovery Advisory Board.
    
    Dr. Feldstein is a member of the American Philosophical Society, a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy, a Fellow of the Econometric Society and a Fellow of the National Association of Business Economists. He is a Trustee of the Council on Foreign Relations and a member of the Trilateral Commission, the Group of 30, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Council of Academic Advisors of the American Enterprise Institute.

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  • 

    Randall Kroszner

    Norman R. Bobins Professor of Economics

    The University of Chicago Booth School of Business

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    Randall Kroszner

    Randall S. Kroszner served as a Governor of the Federal Reserve System from 2006 until 2009. He chaired the committee on Supervision and Regulation of Banking Institutions and the committee on Consumer and Community Affairs. In these capacities, he took a leading role in developing responses to the financial crisis and in undertaking new initiatives to improve consumer protection and disclosure, including rules related to home mortgages and credit cards. He represented the Federal Reserve Board on the Financial Stability Forum (now called the Financial Stability Board), the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision, and the Central Bank Governors of the American Continent and was a director of NeighborWorks America. Dr. Kroszner chaired the working party of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), composed of deputy central bank governors and finance ministers, on Policies for the Promotion of Better International Payments Equilibrium. As a member of the Fed Board, he was also a voting member of the Federal Open Market Committee.
    
    From 2001 to 2003, Dr. Kroszner was a member of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers (CEA). He was involved in formulating policy on a wide range of issues, including responses to corporate governance scandals, government-sponsored enterprise reform, pension reform, terrorism risk insurance, tax reform, currency crisis management, sovereign debt restructuring, the role of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and international trade and development.

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• 4:00 - 4:45

  Panel 3: Current Economic Policy Issues

  • Moderator

    

    Alan Murray

    Editor

    Fortune Magazine

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    Alan Murray

    As Editor of Fortune, Alan Murray is responsible for overseeing Fortune magazine and Fortune.com, with a combined audience of more than 13 million readers, as well as Fortune digital media and Fortune’s conferences. He was named Editor of Fortune in August 2014.
    
    Fortune’s conference division includes Fortune Brainstorm Tech, Fortune Brainstorm Green, and the highly successful Fortune Most Powerful Women series, with annual events in the U.S., Hong Kong, London and a new MPW: Next Gen conference to be held for the first time in 2014. The Fortune Global Forum has convened world leaders and heads of global business since 1995 and most recently took place in 2013 in Chengdu, China with attendees such as Jamie Dimon, Tony Blair, Angela Ahrendts, Jeffrey Katzenberg, Stephen Elop, Sir Martin Sorrell, Muhtar Kent and Yao Ming, among many others. Fortune is the only business magazine with a truly global distribution, and the Fortune 500 is universally recognized as the most important list of top corporations.
    
    Murray’s diverse background includes serving as the President of the Pew Research Center, hosting an eponymous show on CNBC and more than two decades at The Wall Street Journal, where he had stints overseeing digital operations and the Journal’s Washington bureau.

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  • 

    Ben S. Bernanke

    Distinguished Fellow in Residence, Economic Studies

    @BenBernanke

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  • 

    Michael Boskin

    Senior Fellow

    Hoover Institution

    T.M. Friedman Professor of Economics

    Stanford University

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    Michael Boskin

    Michael J. Boskin is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the T. M. Friedman Professor of Economics at Stanford University. He is also a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. In addition, he advises governments and businesses globally.
    
    Boskin served as chairman of the President's Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) from 1989 to 1993. The Independent Council for Excellence in Government rated his CEA as one of the five most respected agencies (out of one hundred) in the federal government. He chaired the highly influential blue-ribbon Commission on Consumer Price Index, whose report has transformed the way government statistical agencies around the world measure inflation, GDP, and productivity.
    
    Boskin serves on several corporate and philanthropic boards of directors, including Exxon Mobil Corporation and Oracle Corporation.
    
    In addition to Stanford and the University of California, Boskin has taught at Harvard and Yale. He is the author of more than one hundred and fifty books and articles. He is internationally recognized for his research on world economic growth, tax and budget theory and policy, US saving and consumption patterns, and the implications of changing technology and demography on capital, labor, and product markets. His op-eds appear regularly in the Wall Street Journal and other leading newspapers. He also writes a bimonthly column on global economics syndicated in 145 countries.

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  • 

    Maurice Obstfeld

    Class of 1958 Professor of Economics

    University of California, Berkeley

    Chief Economist

    International Monetary Fund

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    Maurice Obstfeld

    Maurice Obstfeld is a professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley and currently Chief Economist at the International Monetary Fund.
    
    He is well known for his work in international economics. He is among the most influential economists in the world according to IDEAS/RePEc. He graduated from Pennsylvania summa cum laude, Cambridge and MIT. Director of the Center for International and Development Economic Research (CIDER). He joined Berkeley in 1989 as a professor, following appointments at Columbia (1979–1986) and the University of Pennsylvania (1986–1989). He was also a visiting professor at Harvard between 1989 and 1991. He received his Ph.D. from MIT in 1979. Obstfeld serves as honorary advisor to the Bank of Japan's Institute of Monetary and Economic Studies. Among Obstfeld's honors are the Carroll Round Keynote Lecture, Woodward Lecture, and Bernhard Harms Prize and Lecture in 2004. Obstfeld is a Fellow of the Econometric Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is active as a research Fellow of CEPR, a research associate at NBER, and an International Research Fellow at the Kiel Institute for the World Economy.
    
    On June 3, 2014, the White House announced that Obstfeld would join the Council of Economic Advisers as lead macroeconomist.
    
    On July 20, 2015, Christine Lagarde, Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), announced her intention to appoint Obstfeld as Economic Counsellor and Director of the IMF’s Research Department. Obstfeld succeeds Olivier Blanchard whose retirement was announced previously. He began his work at the Fund on September 8, 2015.

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  • 

    Joseph Stiglitz

    University Professor

    Columbia University

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    Joseph Stiglitz

    Joseph E. Stiglitz was born in Gary, Indiana in 1943. A graduate of Amherst College, he received his PHD from MIT in 1967, became a full professor at Yale in 1970, and in 1979 was awarded the John Bates Clark Award, given biennially by the American Economic Association to the economist under 40 who has made the most significant contribution to the field. He has taught at Princeton, Stanford, MIT and was the Drummond Professor and a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. He is now University Professor at Columbia University in New York, where he is also the founder and Co-President of the university's Initiative for Policy Dialogue. He is also the Chief Economist of the Roosevelt Institute. In 2001, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics for his analyses of markets with asymmetric information, and he was a lead author of the 1995 Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. In 2011, Time named Stiglitz one of the 100 most influential people in the world. He is now serving as President of the International Economic Association.
    
    Stiglitz was a member of the Council of Economic Advisers from 1993-95, during the Clinton administration, and served as CEA chairman from 1995-97. He then became Chief Economist and Senior Vice-President of the World Bank from 1997-2000. In 2008 he was asked by the French President Nicolas Sarkozy to chair the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress, which released its final report in September 2009 (published as Mismeasuring Our Lives). He now chairs a High Level Expert Group at the OECD attempting to advance further these ideas. In 2009 he was appointed by the President of the United Nations General Assembly as chair of the Commission of Experts on Reform of the International Financial and Monetary System, which also released its report in September 2009 (published as The Stiglitz Report). Since the crisis, he has played an important role in the creation of the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET), which seeks to reform the discipline so it is better equipped to find solutions for the great challenges of the 21st century.

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• 4:45 - 5:00

  Concluding Comments

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    Jason Furman

    Chairman

    The White House Council of Economic Advisors

    Former Senior Fellow & Director of the Hamilton Project

    The Brookings Institution

    View Bio

    Jason Furman

    Jason Furman was confirmed by the Senate on August 1, 2013 as the 28th Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers. In this role, he serves as President Obama’s Chief Economist and a Member of the Cabinet. Furman has served the President since the beginning of the Administration, previously holding the position of Principal Deputy Director of the National Economic Council and Assistant to the President. Immediately prior to the Administration, Furman was Economic Policy Director for the President’s campaign in 2008 and a member of the Presidential Transition Team. Furman held a variety of posts in public policy and research before his work with President Obama. In public policy, Furman worked at both the Council of Economic Advisers and National Economic Council during the Clinton administration and also at the World Bank. In research, Furman was a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and also has served in visiting positions at various universities, including NYU’s Wagner Graduate School of Public Policy. Furman has conducted research in a wide range of areas, such as fiscal policy, tax policy, health economics, Social Security, and domestic and international macroeconomics. In addition to numerous articles in scholarly journals and periodicals, Furman is the editor of two books on economic policy. Furman holds a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University.

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