Faculty
EXTERNAL LECTURERS
Philippe Bacchetta is Swiss Finance Institute professor of economics at the University of Lausanne and a research fellow of the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR, London). He was director of the Study Center Gerzensee 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 Paris School of Economics, 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 president of the Swiss Society of Economics and Statistics and a fellow of the European Economic Association. His research interests include open economy macroeconomics, financial crises, and monetary economics.
Pierpaolo Benigno is professor of economics at LUISS Guido Carli. He is Research Fellow of CEPR (Centre for Economic Policy Research) and EIEF (Einaudi Institute for Economics and Finance). He holds a degree in economics from Bocconi University and a Ph.D. in economics from Princeton. He previously taught at New York University and Columbia University. Pierpaolo Benigno areas of research are open-economy macroeconomics and monetary economics. He has published articles in leading academic journal, and is currently coeditor of the International Journal of Central
Banking.
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 European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund. 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.
Giancarlo Corsetti is professor of macroeconomics at the University of Cambridge (previously at the European University Institute, the University of Rome III, Bologna, and Yale). His research is focused on international dimensions of economic policy. His contributions range from theoretical and empirical work on fiscal and monetary policy, to analyses of currency and financial crises and their international contagion. He has published articles in leading academic journal, and is currently co-editor of the Journal of International Economics and the International Journal of Central Banking. Professor Corsetti has long developed research collaboration with monetary authorities and policy institutions in Europe and overseas. He is Program Director at the Centre for Economic Policy Research in London.
Jeffrey Frankel is James W. Harpel Professor of Capital Formation and Growth at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. He directs the program in International Finance and Macroeconomics at the National Bureau of Economic Research, where he is also on the Business Cycle Dating Committee, which officially declares recessions. He served at the Council of Economic Advisers in 1983-84 and 1996-99. As CEA Member appointed by President Clinton, Frankel’s responsibilities included international economics, macroeconomics, and the environment. Before moving East, he had been Professor of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley. He currently serves as a foreign member of the Monetary Policy Committee of the Bank of Mauritius and on advisory panels for the Federal Reserve Banks of New York and Boston, the Peterson Institute for International Economics, and theBureau of Economic Analysis. His research interests include international finance, currencies, monetary and fiscal policy, commodities, regional blocs, and global environmental issues. He was born in San Francisco, graduated from Swarthmore College, and received his Economics PhD from MIT.
Martín Gonzalez-Eiras is associate professor of economics at the University of Copenhagen. He holds a PhD in economics from MIT, and has been on the faculty of Universidad de San Andres (Argentina) and Universidad Adolfo Ibáńez (Chile). He held visiting positions at IIES, Study Center Gerzensee, and Columbia University. He has research interests in macroeconomics, political economy, public finance and banking. He has papers published in the Journal of Monetary Economics, European Economic Review and Review of Economic Dynamics. He has been a consultant at the IADB and has received a variety of grants and awards, including the GDN First Prize Medal in Financial Markets and a Fulbright research grant.
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, andthe 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 Johannes Gutenberg 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.
David N. DeJong earned his Bachelor of Arts degree, summa cum laude, from Central College in Iowa in 1985, and his doctorate from the University of Iowa in 1989, both in economics. He joined the University of Pittsburgh as an Assistant Professor in Arts and Sciences Department of Economics in 1989. He was promoted to Professor in 2001 and he served as Department Chair from 2006-2010. Currently he serves as Vice Provost for Academic Planning and Resources Management. He has also served as a Visiting Professor at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Vienna, DiTella University in Buenos Aires, and the Kiel Institute for the World Economy in Kiel, Germany. DeJong’s research focuses on macroeconomics, econometrics, and transition economics. He specifically focuses on the formal statistical implementation of theoretical models for the purpose of analyzing and forecasting aggregate
economic activity. His research has been supported by grants from the National Science Foundation and the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research, and has been published in top general-interest and field journals. In addition to publishing more than 40 published refereed journal articles, he is the coauthor of the textbook Structural Macroeconomics (Princeton University Press, 2007). He also served as Associate Editor of the Journal of Business and Economic Statistics from 2000 to 2006.
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.
Angelo Ranaldo is Full Professor of Finance and Systemic Risk at the University of St.Gallen and Member of the Board of the Swiss Institute for Banking and Finance s/bf-HSG and of the School of Finance. His field of rields of research are systemic risk, market microstructure, international finance, asset pricing, monetary policy and public debt management. His research papers in these fields are well-documented through many publications in peer-reviewed scholarly journals, as in Journal of Finance, Review of Finance, Journal of Money Credit and Banking, Journal of Financial & Quantitative Analysis, Journal of Banking and Finance, and Journal of International Money & Finance. Before joining the University of St.Gallen, he worked for several years as an economic advisor and member of senior management at the Swiss National Bank (SNB). His professional experience also includes a visiting
position as Senior Economist at the Federal Reserve of New York and several years in the banking areas of asset allocation and risk management. After completing his undergraduate and master studies at the University Bocconi, he obtained his doctoral degree from the University of Fribourg. He also was
as a visiting scholar at the New York University – Stern School of Business. His teaching experience includes several lectures at the university of Fribourg and Zurich as well as a visiting professorship at Aarhus University in Denmark. Angelo completed his «habilitation» at the University of Zurich in 2010 where he is still a (external) lecturer («Privatdozent»).
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.
Ernst-Ludwig von Thadden is professor of Microeconomics and Finance at the University of Mannheim. He was previously professor of economics at the Département d’Econométrie et Economie Politique at the University of Lausanne. He obtained his Ph.D. in economics at the University of Bonn within the “European Doctoral Program in Economics” in 1991, after an undergraduate degree in mathematics and economics at the university of Heidelberg and M.Phil. studies at the London School of Economics. He is research fellow at the Center for Economic Policy Research (London), fellow of the European Economic Association, and former resident fellow of the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences in Stanford. He was director of the doctoral program of the International Center FAME at the Universities of Lausanne and Geneva and director of the Graduate School in Economic
and Social Sciences at Mannheim University. He has been a co-organiser of the European Summer Symposium in Financial Markets, board member of several journals and a consultant to the World Bank and other international institutions. His research covers corporate finance, banking, international finance, political economy, and contract theory.
Harald Uhlig is Professor at the Department of Economics of the University of Chicago since 2007 and was chairman of that department from 2009 to 2012. Previously, he held positions at Princeton, Tilburg University and the Humboldt Universität Berlin. He served as coeditor of Econometrica from 2006 to 2010, and is current co-editor of the JPE, since April 2012. He is a consultant of the Bundesbank and the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. He chaired the CEPR business cycle dating committee from 2005 to 2012. He is a fellow of the Economic Society, a recipient of the Gossen Preis of the Verein für Socialpolitik and is a member of the CEPR and the NBER. Harald Uhlig is a specialist in applied quantitative theory and applied quantitative methods in economics. Uhlig’s research interests include macroeconomics, business cycles, financial markets, economic policy and Bayesian time series analysis. In particular, he is interested in studying the interrelation of macroeconomics and financial markets, and the role of monetary and fiscal policy.
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. He 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 G. 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.
Carl E. Walsh Carl E. Walsh is Distinguished Professor of economics at the University of California, Santa Cruz and a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. In addition to numerous journal articles, he is the author of Monetary Theory and Policy, a graduate level text on monetary economics. He is a past member of the board of editors of the American Economic Review and is currently a coeditor of the International Journal of Central Banking as well as a member of the editorial boards of several other journals.
LECTURERS OF THE STUDY CENTER
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.
Nils Herger is lecturer at the Study Centre Gerzensee, lecturer at the University of Berne, and research affiliate to the national competence centre in research (NCCR) for trade regulation. He studied for a B.A. in economics at the Universities of Bern and Neuchâtel and received an M.Sc. and Ph.D. in economics from the University of Exeter (United Kingdom). Before taking up his current position at the Study Centre, he has worked as an economic advisor for the Swiss Competition Commission and the Swiss Business Federation. Research interests include empirical aspects of international trade and finance, international investment, the economics of corruption, and industrial organization.
Sylvia Kaufmann is Deputy Director of the Study Center Gerzensee and lecturer at the University of Basel. She is member of the monetary theory and policy committee and the econometrics committee of the Verein für Socialpolitik. Sylvia Kaufmann received her habilitation from the University of Basel, where she stayed as Visiting Scholar and Visiting Professor on several occasions. She holds a licentiate and a doctorate from the University of Bern. After her dissertation, she became Assistant Professor at the University of Vienna. As consultant, she worked for the Economic Analysis Division of the Austrian Central Bank, before joining the Austrian Central Bank as Research Economist in the Economic Studies Division. Previous to joining the Study Center
she was Senior Staff member of the Swiss National Bank in the Inflation Forecasting Unit. Her research interests include macroeconomics, monetary policy, applied time series econometrics.