Faculty
Philippe Bacchetta is professor of macroeconomics at the University of Lausanne and a research fellow of the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR, London). He is also advisor at the Study Center Gerzensee and was its director from 1998 to 2007. He received his Ph.D. and M.A. in economics from Harvard University and his B.A. and M.S. in economics from the University of Lausanne. Philippe Bacchetta has been an assistant professor at Brandeis University, USA, at ESADE and the Instituto de Análisis Económico, both in Barcelona. He has also taught at the University of Geneva, the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, the University of Freiburg (Germany), the Universitat Autonoma of Barcelona, and CEMFI in Madrid. He has been visiting scholar at Harvard University, the IMF and the NBER and an academic consultant at various central banks. In 2010 he was Duisenberg Research Fellow at the European Central Bank. He is a fellow of the European Economic Association. His research interests include open economy macroeconomics, international finance, and monetary economics.
Filippo Brutti is lecturer at the Study Center Gerzensee. He holds a Post-Doc position at the Institute for Empirical Research in Economics, University of Zurich and received his Ph.D. at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra. Prior to his graduate studies, he obtained a B.A. in economics from Bocconi University. He also spent a semester at the European Central Bank, where his main task was the analysis of global current account unbalances. His research focuses on international macroeconomics and trade, with major interest in the analysis of sovereign defaults and liquidity crises in emerging markets and of cross-country growth volatility differences.
Lawrence J. Christiano is the Alfred W. Chase Professor of Business Institutions in the Department of Economics at Northwestern University. He is a consultant at several Federal Reserve Banks and has been a regular visitor to the ECB and the IMF. He is a fellow of the Econometric Society and has been associate editor of several journals. He has published widely in the areas of macroeconomics and applied time series analysis.
Dr. Casper G. de Vries holds the chair of monetary economics at the Erasmus School of Economics, Erasmus University Rotterdam and heads the risk management program at the Duisenberg School of Finance. Casper is a fellow and board member of the Tinbergen Institute, is a member of the EMU Monitor group and he has served as vice dean of research and education at the Erasmus School of Economics. His graduate training was at Purdue University after which he has held positions at Texas A&M University and K.U. Leuven. He has been visiting scholar at several European and American research institutes and has been academic consultant for pension funds and central banks. Casper De Vries's research interests are focused on international monetary issues, like foreign exchange rate determination and exchange rate risk, the issues surrounding the Euro, financial markets risk, risk management and systemic risk. In his research on financial risks, he has specialized in calculating the risks on extreme events by means of statistical extreme value analysis. Other research interests are applied game theory; in particular contest and auction theory which can be applied to the theory of lobbying. He has published widely in leading internationally refereed journals.
Behzad Diba is a professor of economics at Georgetown University. He received his Ph.D. in economics in 1984 from Brown University. He has taught courses on macroeconomics, financial markets, international finance, and applications of mathematical methods. His research interests are in macroeconomics and international finance.
Thierry Foucault is Professor of Finance at HEC, Paris where he received his Ph.D in Finance in 1994. He is a research fellow of the Centre for Economic Policy (CEPR) , a senior research fellow of the Europlace Institute of Finance and a member of GREGHEC (CNRS). He has taught in various institutions such as Carnegie Mellon University (USA), the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), the Nordic Finance Network, Oxford (Said Business School), Pompeu Fabra University (Spain), the Studienzentrum Gerzensee (Switzerland), and the Tinbergen Institute(Netherlands). His research focuses on the determinants of financial markets liquidity and the industrial organization of the securities industry. He has worked on various topics such as the role of volatility in limit order markets, the implications of automation for financial markets liquidity, competition bewteen trading platforms and cross-listings. His work is published in top-tier scientific journals including the Journal of Finance, the Journal of Financial Economics, the Review of Financial Studies, the Rand Journal of Economics and the Journal of Financial Intermediation. He serves on the scientific committees of the Autorité des Marchés Financiers (the French public agency in charge of financial markets regulation), the Research Foundation of the Banque de France, MTSgroup and on the executive committee of the European Finance Association (EFA). He acts as co-editor of the Review of Finance since 2009. For his research, he received awards from the Europlace Institute of Finance in 2005 and 2009, the annual research prize of the HEC Foundation in 2006 and 2009, and the Analysis Group award for the best paper on Financial Markets and Institution presented at the 2009 WFA meetings.
Xavier Freixas is professor at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona (Spain), where he directs the Center for Financial Economics Research, and a research fellow at CEPR. He is also Chairman of GARP’s Risk-Based Regulation Program Committee and was past president of the European Finance Association and an associate editor of Journal of Financial Intermediation and Journal of Financial Services Research. His previous academic positions include Houblon Norman senior fellow of the Bank of England and visiting research fellow, Financial Market Group of the London School of Economics, joint executive director Fundación de Estudios de Economía Aplicada FEDEA, professor at Montpellier and Toulouse Universities. He has been invited lecturer at Ecole des Hautes Etudes, ENDSAE (Paris), CEMFI, The Wharton School of Economics, and Harvard and as well as IIlinois University of Illinois. In policy related issues, he has cooperated with Commissariat General au Plan (Paris). He has been a consultant for the World Bank, the Interamerican Development Bank, Comisíon Sistema Eléctrico Nacional, The European Central Bank, The New York Fed and the European Investment Bank.
Stefan Gerlach is professor of monetary economics at, and Director of, the Institute for Monetary and Financial Stability at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt , a research fellow of the CEPR and a fellow of the CFS. He is furthermore an External Member of the Monetary Policy Committee of the Bank of Mauritius. Before joining the university in September 2007, he was secretary to the Committee of the Global Financial System at the BIS. Between 2001 and 2004 he served as executive director (research) at the Hong Kong Monetary Authority and Director of the Hong Kong Institute for Monetary Research, and worked in the research area of the BIS between 1992 and 2001. Between 1986 and 1992 he was on the faculty at Brandeis University, USA, leaving as a tenured associate professor of economics. He has been a visiting assistant professor at Brown University , USA , and at INSEAD in France. His research interests are in the areas of monetary policy and empirical macroeconomics.
Amit Goyal is a professor of finance at HEC Lausanne. Formerly on the faculty of Emory University (Atlanta, USA), he holds a Ph.D. in Finance from University of California at Los Angeles. He has research interests in empirical asset pricing, predictability of stock returns, portfolio optimization, and pension funds. His papers have been published in a variety of academic journals including the Journal of Finance, the Journal of Financial Economics, and the Review of Financial Studies. "
Michel A. Habib is professor of finance at the Swiss Banking Institute of the University of Zurich and holds a Senior Chair at the Swiss Finance Institute. His research interests are corporate finance and the theory of the firm. His research has appeared in a number of academic and practitioner publications, such as the Journal of Business, the Journal of Finance, the Review of Financial Studies, and the Journal of Applied Corporate Finance. He directs the NCCR FINRISK. He is a graduate of McGill University and the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and was associate professor of finance at the London Business School prior to joining the University of Zurich.
Philipp Harms is professor of economics at the University of Mainz (Germany) and joined the Study Center Gerzensee in September 2002. Before receiving his doctorate in economics from the University of St. Gallen in 1999, he attended the Program for Doctoral Students at Gerzensee and spent a year as a visiting graduate student at the University of Maryland. Upon graduation, he joined the faculty of the University of Konstanz (Germany) where he worked as an assistant professor from 1999 through 2004. He also taught classes in macroeconomics and monetary economics at the Universities of St. Gallen and Lausanne, and from 2004 through 2010 he was professor of macroeconomics at RWTH Aachen University (Germany). His main research areas are international economics, macroeconomics and political economy.
Erwan Morellec is Swiss Finance Institute professor and professor of finance at EPFL (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology), Switzerland. Formerly on the faculties of the University of Rochester (USA) and of the University of Lausanne (Switzerland), he holds a Ph.D. in finance from HEC Paris. He is project director for the Swiss National Science Foundation, the head of the Swiss Finance Institute (SFI) Doctoral Program, and a CEPR research fellow. He has research interests in corporate finance and asset pricing. His papers have been published in a variety of academic journals including the Journal of Finance, the Journal of Financial Economics, the Review of Financial Studies, the Journal of Business, and the Journal of Economic Theory.
Dirk Niepelt is Director of the Study Center Gerzensee, Professor at the University of Bern and visiting professor at the Institute for International Economic Studies (IIES) at Stockholm University. A research affiliate at the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR, London), CESifo (Munich) research network member and member of the macroeconomic committee of the Verein für Socialpolitik, he also serves on the board of the Swiss Society of Economics and Statistics. Dirk Niepelt received his Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and holds a licentiate and doctorate from the University of St. Gallen. Previous to joining the Study Center, he was assistant professor at IIES. Before completing his Ph.D., he worked at applied research institutes in St. Gallen and Zurich (FEW, KOF) and visited the European Central Bank. His research interests include macroeconomics, international finance, political economy, and public finance.
Angelo Ranaldo is an economic advisor at the research unit of the Swiss National Bank. After his undergraduate studies at University Bocconi (Italy), he obtained his doctorate at the University of Fribourg (Switzerland). He was a visiting scholar at the New York University (Stern School of Business), a visiting professor at the Aarhus University (Denmark) and a visiting senior economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. He is also a lecturer at the University of Zurich and at the Gerznesee Study Center. His research papers on financial economics have been published in several peer-reviewed and scholarly journals.
Michael Rockinger is professor of finance at HEC Lausanne and a member of the Swiss Finance Institute. He is a former scientific consultant of the Banque de France. He earned a Ph.D. in economics at Harvard University after graduating in mathematics from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. Recently he published a 540 pages book on how to model “Non-Gaussian finance” with Springer. He has extensively published in international journals. Michael Rockinger has also been a visiting professor at the New Economic School in Moscow, the London Business School, Amos Tuck Business School at Dartmouth College, as well as at the University of California San Diego. His research interests are split in three strands: the information content of financial derivative instruments, finance in emerging markets, as well as empirical aspects of market microstructure.
Anthony Saunders is the John M. Schiff professor of finance and chair of the department of finance at the Stern School of Business, New York University. He received his Ph.D. from the London School of Economics. He is currently on the executive committee of the Salomon Center for the Study of Financial Institutions, NYU. He has served as a visiting professor in many universities, including INSEAD, the Stockholm School of Economics, and the University of Melbourne. He holds positions on the Board of Academic Consultants of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors as well as the Council of Research Advisors for the Federal National Mortgage Association. He has acted as a visiting scholar at the Comptroller of the Currency and at the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia. He also held a visiting position in the research department of the International Monetary Fund. He is the editor of the Journal of Banking and Finance and the Journal of Financial Markets, Instruments and Institutions. His research has been published in all of the major money and banking journals and in several books.
Carl E. Walsh is Distinguished Professor of Economics at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He has taught at the University of Auckland, New Zealand and at Princeton University and has held visiting appointments at UC Berkeley and Stanford. He is a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. His research is in the areas of monetary economics and monetary policy. In addition to numerous journal articles, he is the author of Monetary Theory and Policy, a graduate level text on monetary economics. He has taught intensive courses in monetary economics at the IMF, the Bank of England, the Hong Kong Monetary Authority, the Bank of Spain, the Bank of Portugal, the Central Bank of Brazil, the Finnish Post-Doctorate Program in Economics, and the University of Oslo. He is a past member of the board of editors of the American Economic Review, a co-editor of the International Journal of Central Banking, an associate editor of the Journal of Money, Credit, and Banking, and a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Macroeconomics.