Economic Students and Where They Are Now
Ben Bernanke
Ben Bernanke (Ph.D. 1979) is the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board. Prior to entering public service, he compiled a stellar record as a scholar and teacher in the field of monetary economics. Bernanke wrote his doctoral dissertation on the implications of uncertainty for investment and the dynamics of the business cycle under the supervision of Stanley Fischer, Rudiger Dornbusch, and Robert Solow. He taught at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business for several years before joining the Princeton faculty, where he remained until 2002. Bernanke’s research focused on the role of monetary policy in affecting economic activity, and on the historical analysis of the causes of the Great Depression. In addition to his research activities, he was department chair at Princeton from 1996 to 2002, editor of the American Economic Review, co-author of two textbooks, and director of the Monetary Economics Program at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Between 2002 and 2005, Bernanke served as a Governor of the Federal Reserve Board. In 2005 he succeeded Greg Mankiw (Ph.D. 1983) as Chairman of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers. Later that year, President Bush nominated him to succeed Alan Greenspan as Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board. He has served as Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board since February 1, 2006.
Jim Burrows
Jim Burrows received his Ph.D. in economics from MIT in 1970 after completing his dissertation on the economics of the cobalt market. He joined CRA International (formerly Charles River Associates), a start-up economic consulting firm, in 1967. During his early years at CRA, Jim specialized in mineral and energy economics and was the author or co-author of five books on various topics in this field. During the 1970s, he turned his attention to the growing field of expert economic analysis and testimony in complex litigation matters. At that time he managed CRA’s work for the Penn Central trustees in connection with the special court proceedings to determine the values of the properties taken by the government to form what became Conrail and Amtrak. He also worked on a number of antitrust, trade, and damages cases. Jim became the head of CRA’s litigation practice in 1987 and oversaw the rapid growth of CRA’s antitrust and finance litigation practices. In 1995, Jim was appointed President and Chief Executive Officer and continued to work actively as a consultant until several years ago, when it became necessary to focus all of his time on managing the business. Today, CRA International has become one of the premiere international providers of economic, finance, and business consulting services. CRA operates at an annual run rate of about $350 million and has more than 900 full-time employees in 24 offices worldwide.
Dennis W. Carlton
Dennis W. Carlton received his Ph.D. from the MIT Economics Department in 1975. After serving on the MIT faculty for one year, he joined the University of Chicago faculty where he has been, in various capacities, ever since. Carlton was a member of the Economics Department faculty from 1976 until 1980, and a member of the University of Chicago Law School faculty from 1980 to 1984. In 1984, Carlton became a professor at the Chicago Graduate School of Business. He is a leading expert in industrial organization, and is well known for his theoretical and empirical examinations of demand uncertainty, price rigidity, and his wide ranging work in antitrust economics including most recently work on tie-in sales. He and fellow MIT graduate Jeffrey Perloff (Ph.D. 1976) are the co-authors of Modern Industrial Organization, a leading textbook in that field. In 1977, Carlton became associated with and eventually became president of Lexecon, an economics consulting firm that today has more than 100 employees and is one of the nation’s leading litigation support firms. Carlton has recently put his industrial organization expertise to work in a policy-making context. He was the sole economist to serve on the Antitrust Modernization Commission, a twelve member Congressional commission that issued a major report on reexamination of the antitrust laws. In 2006, he became the Deputy Assistant Attorney General for Economic Analysis in the Antitrust Division at the Department of Justice. He is responsible for supervising the Division’s economists and for providing research to support the antitrust activities of the Justice Department.
Grace Koo
Grace Koo received her S.B. in Economics in 1992. She has pursued a career in financial services with a particular emphasis on the design and trading of securities. Koo joined Bankers Trust immediately after graduation and spent two years trading interest rate and foreign exchange derivatives for corporate clients. She joined Credit Suisse in their financial products division in 1995, and managed their London derivatives desk for five years. In 2001, she returned to New York, where she is a Managing Director in Credit Suisse’s Investment Banking Division. Her responsibilities include structuring derivative transactions for the largest hedge funds, asset managers, and financial institutions in North and South America. Grace serves as a member of the Board of Trustees of the Credit Suisse Americas Foundation. She is also on the Board of Directors of Madison Square Park Conservancy and City Harvest, two non-profit organizations. She is actively involved in MIT Alumni activities in New York City.
Steven Levitt
Steven Levitt received his Ph.D. from the MIT Economics Department in 1994. After three years as a Junior Fellow at Harvard’s Society of Fellows, he joined the faculty at the University of Chicago. He is currently the Alvin H. Baum Professor of Economics and the Director of the Gary Becker Center on Chicago Price Theory. Steve’s pathbreaking research on the economics of crime and on political economy was recognized with the 2003 John Bates Clark medal of the American Economic Association, an award presented every other year to the outstanding American economist under the age of 40. In 2005, Steve distilled many of his research findings into a runaway best-seller, Freakonomics, which he co-authored with Stephen Dubner. The book has been on the New York Times bestseller list for over two years, and it has influenced both the direction of economic research and the popular perception of what economists do. Levitt’s work has pushed the boundaries of economics to explore issues as varied as corruption in professional sports, organizational behavior in drug gangs, and cheating by teachers who “improve” their students’ scores by modifying their answers on standardized tests.
Robert Merton
Robert Merton received his Ph.D. from the MIT Economics Department in 1970 and joined the finance faculty of MIT’s Sloan School of Management, where he became a full professor at age 29 and in 1980 was named the inaugural J.C. Penney Professor of Management. Many of his students from his nearly two-decade span at MIT have played a critical role in bringing the tools of contemporary asset pricing to a wide range of applications on Wall Street and elsewhere. In 1988, Merton moved to the Harvard Business School, where he is currently the John and Natty MacArthur University Professor. Merton is widely recognized as one of the founding fathers of modern finance theory. He has written extensively on portfolio choice, capital asset pricing, option pricing,and risk management, with particular emphasis on the role of contingent claims analysis. He has also written on the design, operation and regulation of financial institutions. In 1997, Merton and former MIT Sloan School faculty member Myron Scholes shared the Nobel Prize in Economics in recognition of their work in option pricing and derivative security valuation. Merton is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a former president of the American Finance Association. Through the generosity of Merton’s former students, colleagues and friends, there is now an endowed professorship—the Robert C. Merton (1970) Professorship in Financial Economics—in the Sloan School of Management.