16 top economists, including Nobel laureates and president of Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, to confer Jan. 31 on nation's economic crisis
January 20, 2009
Sixteen leading economists will confer Jan. 31 at University of Richmond's Jepson School of Leadership Studies on the American economic crisis.
Jeffrey M. Lacker, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, will join Nobel Prize winners James Buchanan, constitutional political economist, Vernon Smith, experimental economist, and 13 other scholars in daylong private discussions.
The participants—who include economic historians, macroeconomists, financial economists and policy makers—will sum up their discussions and take questions from an invited audience of students, faculty, guests and news media at a 3:30 p.m. presentation.
"The broad question will be the role of leadership in democratic capitalism," explained Jepson School Dean Sandra Peart, a historian of economic thought and co-organizer of the conference with David M. Levy, professor of economics at George Mason University. Three private sessions will each focus on a theme of standards, transparency and experts.
"In the closed sessions, the scholars will discuss such issues as improving institutions, the relationships among finance, trust and ethics, how leadership helps ensure adherance to recognized standards, making transparency incentive-compatible, and the proper roles of public discussion and expert judgment during an economic crisis," Peart said.
As president of the Richmond Fed, Lacker serves as a voting member of the Federal Open Market Committee. He originally joined the Richmond Fed as an economist in the banking area of the research department and was subsequently appointed research officer, vice president, senior vice president and director of the research department.
Buchanan received the Nobel Prize for Economic Science in 1986 and is the advisory general director of the Center for Study of Public Choice. He is distinguished professor emeritus of economics at George Mason University and Virginia Tech.
Smith won the Nobel for economic science in 2002. He holds joint appointments with the Argyros School of Business and Economics and the School of Law at Chapman University and is part of a team that will create and run the new Economic Science Institute.
Other participants will include:
- Michael Bordo, professor of economics and director of the Center for Monetary and Financial History at Rutgers University
- David Colander, the Christian A. Johnson Distinguished Professor of Economics at Middlebury College
- Dean D. Croushore, associate professor of economics and Rigsby Fellow in Economics at the University of Richmond and interim director of the Real-Time Data Research Center at the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia
- Perry G. Mehrling, professor of economics, Barnard College at Columbia University
- William A. Niskanen, chairman emeritus and distinguished senior economist at the Cato Institute, former acting chairman of then-President Reagan's Council of Economic Advisers, and former director of economics at Ford Motor Company
- Salim Rashid, professor of economics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Hugh Rockoff, professor of economics at Rutgers University
- Aris Spanos, the Wilson Schmidt Professor of Economics at Virginia Tech
- Richard E. Wagner, the Hobart R. Harris Professor of Economics and the graduate director of the economics department at George Mason University
- David Warsh, former Boston Globe, Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Newsweek and Pacific Stars and Stripes economics reporter and two-time winner of financial journalism's Loeb Award
- Sidney G. Winter, the Deloitte and Touche Professor Emeritus of Management at the Wharton School of Business of the University of Pennsylvania.