Speakers 
Manuel Adelino
Manuel Adelino is an associate professor of finance at the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University. He conducts research on household finance, corporate finance, and real estate finance. His current work focuses on the effect of access to collateral on new business creation and on the effects of the supply of mortgage credit on house prices. Adelino received a PhD in financial economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Sloan School of Management. Before studying at MIT, he worked in the Lisbon office of McKinsey & Company as a business analyst.
Efraim Benmelech
Efraim Benmelech is the Harold L. Stuart Professor of Finance and the Director of the Guthrie Center for Real Estate Research at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. He is also a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Benmelech’s research interests are in the field of credit markets, where he studies financial contracting, financial crises, securitization, bankruptcy, and financial distress. His research has been published in the Journal of Public Economics, the Journal of Financial Economics, and the Quarterly Journal of Economics, among other journals. He also writes extensively on the economics of terrorism and economic history. Benmelech’s research on financial distress, the financial crisis, and terrorism have received wide media coverage in outlets such as Bloomberg, the Boston Globe, Fortune, The Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Financial Times, The Economist, and USA Today. Benmelech received his PhD in finance from the University of Chicago and his MBA and his BA in economics and business administration from Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Falk Bräuning
Falk Bräuning is a senior economist and policy advisor in the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston Research Department. He has served as a visiting researcher at the Deutsche Bundesbank. His research focuses on financial economics, banking, financial markets, and monetary policy. He is also interested in topics in macroeconomics and econometrics. Bräuning’s work has been published in the Journal of Finance, the Review of Financial Studies, the Journal of Econometrics, and the Journal of Monetary Economics, among others. Bräuning joined the Boston Fed in 2015 after earning his PhD in economics from the VU University Amsterdam and the Tinbergen Institute. He holds an MPhil in economics from the Tinbergen Institute and an MSc in economics from the University of Mannheim in Germany.
Karen Dynan
Karen Dynan is a professor of the practice in the Department of Economics at Harvard University. From 2014 to 2017, she served as assistant secretary for economic policy and chief economist at the US Department of the Treasury, where she led analysis of economic conditions and development of policies to address the nation’s economic challenges. From 2009 to 2013, Dynan was vice president and co-director of the Economic Studies program at the Brookings Institution. Before that, she was on the staff of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, leading work in several areas including macroeconomic forecasting, household finances, and the Fed’s response to the financial crisis. Dynan also served as a senior economist at the White House Council of Economic Advisers from 2003 to 2004 and as a visiting assistant professor at Johns Hopkins University in 1998. Dynan’s research focuses on fiscal and other types of macroeconomic policy, consumer behavior, and household finances. She received her PhD in economics from Harvard University and her AB from Brown University.
Isil Erel
Isil Erel is the David A. Rismiller Chair in Finance and the academic director of the Risk Institute at the Fisher College of Business of the Ohio State University. Her research spans a variety of areas within corporate finance, with particular emphasis on mergers and acquisitions, corporate governance, and banking. This research has been published in the Journal of Finance, the Journal of Financial Economics, and the Review of Financial Studies, among others.Erel is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research’s Corporate Finance program and a research member at the European Corporate Governance Institute. She also serves on the boards of the Foundation for the Advancement of Research in Financial Economics and the Risk Institute.Erel is an editor of the Review of Corporate Finance Studies. Previously, she was an associate editor of the Review of Financial Studies, the Journal of Banking and Finance, and Financial Management. She is the 2010 recipient of the Pace Setters Faculty Research Award, the 2015 recipient of the Distinguished Faculty Award, and 2020 recipient of the Recognition Award for significant out-of-classroom contributions at the Fisher College of Business. She also received the Distinguished Referee Award from the Review of Financial Studies in 2012. Erel teaches financial institutions courses in both graduate and undergraduate programs at the Fisher College of Business. She holds a PhD in financial economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Sloan School of Management and a BA in economics and business administration from Koc University in Istanbul.
José L. Fillat
José L. Fillat is a senior economist in the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston Research Department. His research focuses on macro-finance, asset pricing, housing, and the links between international trade and finance. He has studied the asset pricing implications of long-run risks in consumption and housing. He also investigates portfolio allocation decisions in the presence of housing. In the international trade and finance fields, he studies the relationship between firms’ risk premium and their international presence. His work has been published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the Journal of International Economics, and the Review of Financial Studies. Fillat joined the Boston Fed in 2008, first working in the Banking Supervision Department, where he contributed to the system-wide implementation of Basel II Advanced Approaches and was member of a system committee overseeing the development of models for Dodd-Frank Act Stress Testing. Fillat teaches in the applied economics graduate program at the Woods College of Advancing Studies (WCAS) at Boston College, and he has taught economics at Harvard University. He also serves on the board of advisors of the MS in applied economics at the WCAS. Fillat earned a PhD in economics from the University of Chicago and a BA and MSc in economics from Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Spain.
Kristin J. Forbes
Kristin J. Forbes is the Jerome and Dorothy Lemelson Professor of Management and Global Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Sloan School of Management. In 2014, she also became an external member of the Monetary Policy Committee for the Bank of England. This dual role continues her tradition of combining academics with senior policy positions. From 2003 to 2005, Forbes served as a member of the White House’s Council of Economic Advisers, where she was the youngest person to ever hold this position. From 2001 to 2002, she worked in the US Treasury Department as the deputy assistant secretary of quantitative policy analysis for Latin American and Caribbean nations. She also was a member of the Governor’s Council of Economic Advisers for the State of Massachusetts from 2009 to 2014. Forbes is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and a member of the Bellagio Group and Council on Foreign Relations. Her academic research addresses policy-related questions in international macroeconomics. Recent projects include work on capital flows, financial crises, exchange rates, capital controls, macroprudential regulation, foreign investment, and tax holidays. Forbes has chaired research projects on the global financial crisis, global linkages, and international financial contagion. Before joining the MIT faculty, Forbes worked at the World Bank and Morgan Stanley. She graduated summa cum laude from Williams College with a BA in economics and received her PhD in economics from MIT.
Benjamin M. Friedman
Benjamin M. Friedman is the William Joseph Maier Professor of Political Economy at Harvard University. Formerly, he was chairman of the Department of Economics. His newest book is Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, a fundamental reassessment of the foundations of current-day economics that shows how religious thinking has shaped economic thinking ever since the beginnings of modern Western economics and how this influence continues to be relevant today, especially in the United States. Friedman authored two other general interest books, The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth and Day of Reckoning: The Consequences of American Economic Policy Under Reagan and After. He has also written and/or edited 14 other books and more than 150 articles in professional journals aimed primarily at economists and economic policymakers. He is a frequent contributor to publications reaching a broader audience, including The New York Review of Books. Friedman’s current professional activities include serving as a director of the Private Export Funding Corporation, a trustee of the Pioneer Funds, and as a director of the Council for Economic Education. He was a long-time director and member of the editorial board of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Friedman is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
Andra Ghent
Andra Ghent began as a Professor of Finance at the University of Utah where she holds the Ivory-Boyer Chair in Real Estate in Summer 2021. She is the Academic Director of the Ivory-Boyer Real Estate Center. Her current research interests are real estate finance, financial intermediation, and urban economics. Her research has beencited in US congressional testimony and by media outlets such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Forbes, and Bloomberg. Her research has been published in top academic journals such as the Journal of Financial Economics, Journal of Urban Economics, Management Science, the Review of Economic Studies, and the Review of Financial Studies. She is an Associate Editor at the Review of Financial Studies and the Journal of Financial Economics. More information about Professor Ghent can be found at andraghent.com.
Simon Gilchrist
Simon Gilchrist is a professor of economics at New York University and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. His research interests relate to monetary economics and applied macroeconomics. Much of Gilchrist’s research focuses on the consequences of financial market turmoil and its impact on real economic activity, with particular focus on the implications for investment behavior, business-cycle dynamics, and the conduct of monetary policy. In recent work, he has explored the causes and consequences of financial crises and asset prices bubbles, as well as the appropriate monetary policy response to such events. Gilchrist was a professor in the economics department at Boston University before joining the NYU faculty. Prior to arriving at BU in 1995, Gilchrist served as a staff economist at the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, and he has held visiting positions at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. He also has served as an academic consultant to the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System; the Bank of Canada; the Bank of England; the Federal Reserve Banks of Boston, New York, and San Francisco; and the International Monetary Fund. He is currently a member of the editorial board of the American Economic Review and an associate editor at the Review of Economics and Statistics. Gilchrist received his BA from Iowa State University and his PhD from the University of Wisconsin.
Victoria Ivashina
Victoria Ivashina is the Lovett-Learned Chaired Professor of Finance at Harvard Business School. She is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and a research fellow at the Center for Economic Policy Research. Ivashina serves as a department editor for Management Science and associate editor of the Journal of Financial Economics and the Journal of Financial Intermediation. Her research spans multiple areas of financial intermediation including corporate credit markets, global banking operations, asset allocation by pension funds and insurance companies, and value creation by private equity. Ivashina is the co-author of Patient Capital: The Challenges and Promises of Long-Term Investing. She currently co-heads Harvard Business School’s Private Capital Initiative and is a member of the Model Validation Council at the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. Ivashina holds a PhD in finance from the New York University Stern School of Business and a BA in Economics from Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú.
Klaas Knot
Klaas Knot has been the president of De Nederlandsche Bank (DNB) since 2011. He is also vice-chair of the Financial Stability Board (FSB) and chair of the FSB’s Standing Committee on the Assessment of Vulnerabilities. He is also a member of the Governing Council and the General Council of the European Central Bank, a member of the European Systemic Risk Board, a member of the International Monetary Fund’s Board of Governors, and a member of the Board of Directors of the Bank for International Settlements. Knot holds several secondary positions, including chair of the Supervisory Board of the CliniClowns Foundation. Since 2005, he has been a professor in economics of central banking at the University of Groningen, and since 2015 he has also been a professor of monetary stability at the Economics and Business Department of the University of Amsterdam. Knot has published a variety of articles in prominent Dutch and international journals in the fields of monetary and financial economics. Before joining the Governing Board, Knot was deputy treasurer-general and director of financial markets at the Dutch Ministry of Finance (2009–2011). Beginning in 1995, he worked for DNB for almost 12 years, in positions including economic policy officer and director of the Supervisory Policy Division. At different intervals during this period, he was employed by the International Monetary Fund (1998–1999) and the former Pensions and Insurance Supervisory Authority of the Netherlands (2003–2004). Knot graduated with honors in general economics from the University of Groningen, where he also obtained his PhD in economics.
Luc Laeven
Luc Laeven is director-general of the Directorate General Research of the European Central Bank. Previously, he was lead economist in the Research Department of the International Monetary Fund, and he worked at the World Bank. His research focuses on banking and international finance issues, and it has been widely published in top academic journals including the American Economic Review, the Journal of Finance, the Review of Economic Studies, the Journal of Finance, the Journal of Financial Economics, and the Review of Financial Studies. He also has published the books Systemic Risk, Crises and Macroprudential Regulation (MIT Press), Systemic Financial Crises: Containment and Resolution (Cambridge University Press), and Deposit Insurance around the World: Issues of Design and Implementation (MIT Press). He is a professor of finance at Tilburg University, a research fellow of the Centre for Economic Policy Research in London, chair of the ESCB Heads of Research Committee, chair of the Steering Committee of the Euro Area Business Cycle Network, managing editor of the International Journal of Central Banking, and a member of the Board of Directors of TalentNomics. Laeven has an undergraduate degree in econometrics from Tilburg University, a master’s degree in international finance from the University of Amsterdam, and a PhD in economics from the University of Amsterdam. He also studied at the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Lara Loewenstein
Lara Loewenstein is a research economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland. She is an applied microeconomist whose current research focuses on real estate and housing finance. Before joining the Cleveland Fed, Loewenstein was a research associate in the Research Department of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. She earned her BS in mathematics from the University of California, Los Angeles, and her MS and PhD in international economics and finance from Brandeis University.
Kenneth C. Montgomery
Kenneth C. Montgomery is the interim president and chief executive officer at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, a role he assumed October 1, 2021 while serving as first vice president and chief operating officer. Montgomery leads the strategic direction and effective management of the Reserve Bank’s regional and national responsibilities.
In a national capacity, Montgomery is leading the Federal Reserve System’s FedNowSM Service to support faster payments in the United States with interbank real-time gross settlement and integrated clearing. This initiative is part of the Federal Reserve’s ongoing, collaborative efforts to enhance the speed, safety, and efficiency of the U.S. payment system.
Joe Peek
Joe Peek is a vice president and economist in the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston Research Department, where he heads the finance section. He also is a research associate at Columbia University's Center on the Japanese Economy and Business. Peek's current research interests are in financial stability, macro-prudential regulation, international banking, Japanese banking problems, and monetary policy. He earned his BA in mathematics and MA in economics from Oklahoma State University and his PhD in economics from Northwestern University.
He was a fellow at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation's Center for Financial Research from 2004 to 2005. From 2000 to 2011, Peek held the Gatton Chair in International Banking and Financial Economics at the University of Kentucky's Gatton College of Business and Economics. He has also been a professor of economics at Boston College and was a visiting professor at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 1992 and 1994.
Adam S. Posen
Adam S. Posen is president of the Peterson Institute for International Economics. The author, co-author, or editor of eight books, Posen has contributed to research and public policy regarding monetary and fiscal policies in the G-20, the challenges of European integration since the adoption of the euro, China-US economic relations, and developing new approaches to financial recovery and stability. He was one of the first economists to seriously address the political foundations of central bank independence and to analyze Japan’s Great Recession as a failure of macroeconomic policy. From 2009 to 2012, Posen served as an external voting member of the Bank of England’s rate-setting Monetary Policy Committee. He was made an honorary Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II in 2014 for his services to British economic policy. He received the Order of the Rising Sun from the government of Japan in 2021 for his distinguished achievements in advancing US-Japanese economic relations and Japanese economic policy in the global context. Posen received his BA and PhD from Harvard University.
Raghuram G. Rajan
Raghuram G. Rajan is the Katherine Dusak Miller Distinguished Service Professor of Finance at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. He was the governor of the Reserve Bank of India from 2013 to 2016, vice-chairman of the Board of the Bank for International Settlements (2015 to 2016) and chief economist at the International Monetary Fund (2003 to 2006). Rajan’s research interests are in banking, corporate finance, and economic development. His most recent book, The Third Pillar: How Markets and the State hold the Community Behind, was a finalist for the Financial Times-McKinsey prize for best business book in 2019. Rajan’s research has been published recently in the Journal of Finance, the Journal of Financial Economics, and the IMF Economic Review. Rajan was the president of the American Finance Association (AFA) and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He received the AFA’s inaugural Fischer Black Prize in 2003, Euromoney magazine’s Central Banker of the Year award in 2014, and The Banker magazine's Global Central Banker award in 2016.
Ricardo A. M. R. Reis
Ricardo A. M. R. Reis is the A.W. Phillips Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He is the recipient of the 2021 Jahnsson award for best European-based economist under the age of 45. Before that, he had won the 2017 BdF/TSe prize in monetary economics and the 2016 Bernacer prize for best European national under the age of 40 working in macroeconomics and finance. He has published widely in macroeconomics, including inflation expectations, disagreement and inattention, unconventional monetary policies and the central bank’s balance sheet, business cycle models with inequality, automatic stabilizers, limits to public debt, sovereign-bond backed securities, and the role of capital misallocation in the European slump and crisis. Reis received his PhD from Harvard University and was previously on the faculties of Columbia University and Princeton University.
Timothy Riddiough
Timothy Riddiough holds the James A. Graaskamp Chair and is a professor in the Department of Real Estate and Urban Land Economics at the Wisconsin School of Business, University of Wisconsin-Madison. He also currently serves as department chair and as the academic director of the Graaskamp Center for Real Estate. He is best known for his work on credit risk in mortgage lending, mortgage securitization, real options, REIT investment and corporate finance, and land use regulation. Early in his career, Riddiough developed the first “double trigger” model of mortgage default and coined the term “strategic default.” He is the past recipient of the American Real Estate and Urban Economics Association best dissertation and best paper awards, and he is a fellow at the Homer Hoyt Institute for Advanced Studies and the Real Estate Research Institute. He was president of the American Real Estate and Urban Economics Association in 2012. Riddiough has been a visiting fellow at the Hong Kong Monetary Authority and served as a senior advisor to the Bank for International Settlements. He has consulted with many of the major commercial and investment banks in the United States. Riddiough earned his PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and was a tenured professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before he returned to Madison in 2001.
Antoinette Schoar
Antoinette Schoar is the Stewart C. Myers-Horn Family Professor of Finance at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Sloan School of Management. An expert in corporate finance, entrepreneurship, and organizational economics, Schoar researches venture capital, entrepreneurial finance, corporate diversification, governance, and capital budgeting decisions in firms. She has received the Fellowship of the George Stigler Center (1997 to 1999) and the ERP Doctoral Scholarship of the German Ministry of Trade (1995 to 1997). Schoar’s current research focuses on the areas of consumer finance, entrepreneurial finance, and new financial technologies. Some of her ongoing projects investigate how competition in credit card markets impacts consumers, the role of mortgage markets in the economy, applications of behavioral economics to consumer finance and cryptocurrency trading. She is also the cochair of the National Bureau of Economic Corporate Finance group and a cofounder of ideas42, a nonprofit that uses insights from behavioral economics and psychology to solve social problems. Schoar holds a diploma in economics from the University of Cologne in Germany and a PhD in economics from the University of Chicago.
Moritz Schularick
Moritz Schularick is a professor of economics at the University of Bonn, the director of the Macrofinance Lab Bonn, and an assistant vice president in the Research Department of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. In 2015 and 2016, he held the Alfred-Grosser-Chair at Sciences Po in Paris. Previously, he taught at the Free University of Berlin and was a visiting professor at the University of Cambridge. Schularick is an elected member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences, a member of the executive board of the Bonn Graduate School of Economics, a research fellow of the Center of Economic Policy and Research, and a fellow of the Institute for New Economic Thinking. He is a regular advisor to central banks and international organizations. Schularick’s research—at the intersection of macroeconomics and finance, international economics, and economic history—has been published in the American Economic Review, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the Journal of Political Economy, the Journal of Monetary Economics, the Journal of International Economics, and various other journals. His research is currently supported by grants from the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research, Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, and the Institute for New Economic Thinking. He recently has been awarded a Consolidator Grant of the European Research Council. In 2018, Schularick received the Gossen-Prize of the Verein für Socialpolitik (German Economic Association) for the German-speaking economist whose work has gained international recognition. He has a PhD in economics from the Free University of Berlin, an MSc from the London School of Economics and Political Science, and an MA in history, economics, and politics from Humboldt University.
Jeremy C. Stein
Jeremy C. Stein is the Moise Y. Safra Professor of Economics and chairman of the Department of Economics at Harvard University, where he teaches courses in the undergraduate and PhD programs and serves on the board of directors of the Harvard Management Company. Stein’s research has covered such topics as behavioral finance and market efficiency, corporate investment and financing decisions, risk management, capital allocation inside firms, banking, financial regulation, and monetary policy. Stein is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and a member of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s Financial Advisory Roundtable. From 2012 to 2014, he was a member of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. In 2008, he was president of the American Finance Association. In 2009, he served as a senior advisor to the US Treasury Secretary and on the staff of the National Economic Council. Before joining the faculty at Harvard in 2000, Stein was on the finance faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Sloan School of Management for 10 years, most recently as the J.C. Penney Professor of Management. Prior to that, he was an assistant professor of finance at the Harvard Business School from 1987 to 1990. Stein received his AB in economics from Princeton University (summa cum laude) and his PhD in economics from MIT.
Sir Paul Tucker
Sir Paul Tucker is a research fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School, and author of Unelected Power (Princeton University Press, 2018). His new book, provisionally titled Global Discord, is due out next year. His other activities include being a senior fellow at the Center for European Studies at Harvard University; president of the UK’s National Institute for Economic and Social Research; research fellow at UCL’s political science department; a director at Swiss Re; and a Governor of the Ditchley Foundation. He was a central banker for over thirty years at the Bank of England and Basel, where he was a member of the steering committee of the G20 Financial Stability Board, leading its work on resolving too-big-to-fail firms without taxpayer bailouts, chaired the Committee for Payment and Settlement Systems, and was a member of the board of the Bank for International Settlements. He chaired the Systemic Risk Council from 2016 to mid-2021.
J. Christina Wang
J. Christina Wang is a senior economist and policy advisor in the macroeconomic/financial markets section of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston Research Department. Her research interests span a range of areas. One major focus is to understand what banks do and how their mode of operation evolves as a result of advances in (information) technology (which leads, inter alias, to a consistent measure of bank output). She has also studied credit rationing in the aftermath of the Great Recession, application of machine learning methods to FinTech lending, and the cyclicality of productivity. Her work has been published in Economica, Economic Inquiry, and Financial Analysts Journal. Wang received her BA in economics from Tsinghua University in China. She earned her MA in economics at the University of Western Ontario and her PhD in economics at the University of Michigan.
Paul S. Willen
Paul S. Willen is a senior economist and policy advisor in the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston Research Department. Willen conducts academic research with a focus on real estate and mortgage markets as part of the policy mission of the Federal Reserve. For many years, Willen studied the causes and consequences of the 2007–2008 global financial crisis, publishing articles in top scholarly journals, advising policymakers, and testifying in Congress. His research on the topic was featured in virtually every major newspaper in the country. More recently, Willen has analyzed the effects of race and ethnicity on access to mortgage credit. Willen has taught at Princeton University, the University of Chicago, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Harvard University. He did his undergraduate work at Williams College and earned his PhD from Yale University.