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Session 20: Dating Business Cycles
The chair of the Business Cycle Dating Committee at the National Bureau of Economic Research will discuss how the NBER goes about determining business cycle peaks and troughs.
Speaker Materials
Robert Hall podcast on Bloomberg.com with Tom Keene
Robert Hall slideshow
Speakers
Lakshman R. Achuthan
Economic Cycle Research Institute
Lakshman Achuthan is co-founder and managing director of the Economic Cycle Research Institute (ECRI), an independent organization focused on business cycle analysis and forecasting in the tradition established by ECRI’s founder, Geoffrey H. Moore. ECRI maintains business cycle chronologies for 18 countries around the world other than the U.S.
He is also the managing editor of ECRI’s forecasting publications and regularly participates in a wide range of public economic discussions.
He is a member of Time magazine’s board of economists, the New York City Economic Advisory Panel, The Levy Economics Institute’s Board of Governors and serves as trustee on a number of non-profit boards.
Lakshman is the co-author of Beating the Business Cycle: How to Predict and Profit from Turning Points in the Economy published by Doubleday.
Harvey Rosenblum
Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas
Harvey Rosenblum is executive vice president and director of research at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. In this capacity, he serves as economic policy advisor to the Bank's president and as an associate economist for the Federal Open Market Committee, which formulates the nation's monetary policy.
Rosenblum is also a past president and a member of the Executive Committee of the Board of Directors of the National Association for Business Economics (NABE), a prestigious trade association whose 3,000 members are the leading business economists in the United States and many other countries. Past presidents of NABE include several Federal Reserve presidents as well as former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan. Rosenblum is currently serving as Executive Director of the North American Economics and Finance Association. He also is a member of the Product Development and Small Business Incubator Board, appointed by the governor of Texas.
A widely recognized expert on both the national and Texas economies, Rosenblum has written articles for such publications as The Journal of Finance, New York Times, Southwest Economy and The Handbook of Banking Strategy.
Active in economic education, Rosenblum is a visiting professor of finance at Southern Methodist University, teaching courses in contemporary issues on monetary policy and financial institutions and markets.
Rosenblum received a B.A. in economics from the University of Connecticut in 1965 and a Ph.D. in economics from the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 1972.
He began his career with the Federal Reserve in 1970 as an economist with the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, advancing through the ranks to vice president and associate director of research in 1983. He was also a visiting professor of finance with DePaul University from 1973 until 1985. He joined the Dallas Fed as senior vice president and director of research in 1985 and was promoted to executive vice president in 2005.
His current research interests focus on monetary policy, inflation and the growing impact of globalization on the U.S. economy and businesses.
Robert Hall
Stanford University
Robert E. Hall is an applied economist with interests in employment issues, technology, competition, and economic policy in the aggregate economy and in particular markets. His current research focuses on levels of employment and output in market economies and on the economics of high technology.
Hall is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a fellow of the Econometric Society. He presented the Ely Lecture to the American Economic Association in 2001 and served as the Association’s Vice President in 2005.
Along with Hoover Institution colleague Alvin Rabushka, Hall developed a framework for equitable and efficient consumption taxation. Their article in the Wall Street Journal in December 1981 was the starting point for an upsurge of interest in consumption taxation. The proposal is spelled out in more detail in their book, The Flat Tax (Hoover Institution Press). The pair were recognized in Money magazine's Money Hall of Fame for their contributions to financial innovation. Hall is coauthor, with Marc Lieberman, of Economics: Principles and Applications.
Hall also serves as director of the research program on economic fluctuations and growth of the National Bureau of Economic Research, an interuniversity research organization. He is chairman of the Bureau's Committee on Business Cycle Dating, which maintains the semiofficial chronology of the U.S. business cycle.
Hall has advised a number of government agencies on national economic policy, including the Justice Department, the Treasury Department, the Federal Reserve Board, and the Congressional Budget Office, where he serves on the Advisory Committee. He served on the National Presidential Advisory Committee on Productivity. He has testified on numerous occasions before congressional committees concerning national economic policy.
Before coming to Stanford Department of Economics in 1978, Hall taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and at the University of California, Berkeley. Born in Palo Alto, he attended school in Palo Alto and Los Angeles, received his B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1964 and his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1967.
Hall is married to economist Susan Woodward, chairman of Sand Hill Econometrics, and lives in Menlo Park, California.
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