Chapin D. White, Ph.D., is a senior health researcher at the Center
for Studying Health System Change (HSC). He has focused on
microsimulation modeling of health reform, long-term trends and
geographic variation in health spending, medical malpractice,
nonprofit hospitals, and Medicare payment policy. At HSC, he is
focusing on policy analyses relating to the implementation of health
reform and original research quantifying the likely impacts of health
reform. White was formerly a principal analyst at the Congressional
Budget Office, a post-doctoral fellow at the National Bureau of
Economic Research, a consultant to the Medicare Payment Advisory
Commission and an analyst at Abt Associates. White earned his
doctorate in health policy from Harvard University, a master’s degree
in public policy from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and a
bachelor’s degree in social anthropology, cum laude, from Harvard.

His presentation will focus on CBO’s use of evidence in the analysis of budget and economic policies. The presentation will addressed numerous questions, including:

* How does CBO make projections?
* What types of evidence does CBO use?
* How does CBO characterize uncertainty?

To provide a concrete example, he will discuss CBO’s analysis of proposals to limit costs related to medical malpractice, explaining how we incorporated social science research into our analysis. He will also discuss the types of evidence that CBO would be able to use more if they were provided by the research community, such as information from critical reviews, experiments, and demonstrations, as well as data that link administrative records about government programs with information from surveys of potential participants in those programs.

For many years now, experts have addressed both financial and environmental regulation through a microeconomic lens.  Under this approach, regulation is viewed as an analogue to a market transaction and its efficiency evaluated primarily through a cost-benefit analysis predicated on standard neoclassical assumptions.

This talk will examine the question of whether this approach has helped sustain adequate financial and environmental regulation and what the alternative might be.   It draws on a forthcoming book arguing for an economic dynamic approach to law predicated on the idea of law contributing to a macroeconomic framework, rather than directly controlling resource allocation.  This alternative involves making avoidance of systemic risk a major goal of government policy.  It shifts the focus from counting costs and benefits to evaluating the shape of change over time.  And it calls for a more systematic evaluation of economic incentives through an economic dynamic analysis drawing on institutional economics and scenario analysis.  An economic dynamic approach may play to the strengths of government economists, who may have a feel for the nature of the particular form of bounded rationality the actors they regulate exhibit.  This approach confronts, rather than wishes away, the uncertainties that bedevil efforts to address the future through law, which is what both climate and financial regulation must do.

UPDATE: Slides from the talk may be downloaded here: SGE Farrell slides October 2011

The Federal Trade Commission deals with two branches of law enforcement: competition and consumer policy. The talk will reflect the work that the FTC does in those areas. In certain cases, the FTC is suspicious of dominant firms offering price discounts in return for a customer’s willingness to limit dealings with the dominant firm’s rivals. Other times, the FTC gets involved with the  economics of debt collection, which is essential to capital markets but apt to be taken too far, and with some of the things that policy does about that problem.

A background paper is available at:
http://www.milkeninstitute.org/pdf/HousingFinanceReform.pdf

Phillip Swagel is Professor in International Economic Policy at the Maryland School of Public Policy and non-resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. He was assistant secretary for economic policy at the Treasury Department from 2006 to 2009 and has served as chief of staff and senior economist at the White House Council of Economic Advisers, and as an economist at the Federal Reserve Board and the International Monetary Fund. He has taught at Northwestern University and at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business. He received a bachelor’s degree in economics from Princeton University in 1987 and a PhD in economics from Harvard University in 1993.

Donald Marron is the director of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center and a visiting professor at the Georgetown Public Policy Institute. He has been a Member of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers (CEA), Acting Director of the Congressional Budget Office (CBO)  and Executive Director of Congress’s Joint Economic Committee (JEC). He taught economics and finance at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business and in the private sector he managed large antitrust cases (e.g., Pepsi vs. Coke) at Charles River Associates in Washington, DC and served as chief financial officer of a health care software start-up in Austin, TX. He has a Ph.D. in Economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a B.A. in Mathematics from Harvard.

Wendy Edelberg will talk about the final report of the Financial Inquiry Commission which released its report in January 2011.

UPDATE: Slides from the talk may be downloaded here: Edelberg_SGEpresentation.pdf

Does foreign aid deliver value for money in promoting economic growth and improving well being for people in developing countries?

This question is a source of endless debate.  In this presentation, Dr. Bolnick will first discuss the importance of growth for poverty reduction and human welfare in low-income countries—itself a source of controversy—and quickly review the (indecisive) empirical literature on aid and growth. The talk will then focus on the impact and effectiveness of USAID’s economic growth (EG) programs, based on a recent review of the available evidence.

The presentation is adapted from a series of Briefing Notes on Programming for Growth, which Nathan Associates produced for the Economic Growth Office at USAID last year, led by Dr. Bolnick. The Briefing Notes were designed as a contribution to the recurrent discussions about aid effectiveness and development priorities for the foreign aid program.  The full series can be accessed at: http://www.countrycompass.com/policy_briefs.php

UPDATE: Slides from the talk may be downloaded here: Bolnick-SGE-NEC Presentation May 2011

Dr. Nayantara Hensel is the Chief Economist for the Department of the Navy and provides economic guidance on defense industrial base issues, growth projections, the federal budget, interest rates, unemployment, exchange rates, inflation, the financial health of defense contractors, as well as trends in the broader economy and in the defense sector. Dr. Hensel received her BA, MA, and Ph.D. from Harvard University, where she graduated magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa and specialized in finance and economics. She has taught at Harvard University, the Stern School of Business at New York University (NYU), and the US Naval Postgraduate School’s Graduate School of Business and Public Policy, in addition to serving as the Pentagon Scholar in Residence. In the private sector, Dr. Hensel previously served as Senior Manager and Chief Economist for Ernst & Young’s litigation advisory group, managing economist for the New York City office of the Law and Economics Consulting Group (LECG), an economist in the economic consulting arm of Marsh & McLennan. Dr. Hensel has written over 30 articles and research reports. Her recent research has focused on globalization and the US defense industrial base, the role of defense mergers in improving weapons systems cost efficiency, efficiency in IPO auctions relative to traditional processes, the factors impacting discount rates for US Marine Corps personnel, and market structure-specific and firm-specific factors impacting economies of scale and density in European and Japanese banks. She has published in the International Journal of Managerial Finance, the Review of Financial Economics, Business Economics, the European Financial Management Journal, the Journal of Financial Transformation, and Harvard Business School Working Knowledge. Dr. Hensel has presented her work at a variety of institutions, including the Federal Reserve Banks in Chicago, Dallas, Boston, and Cleveland, the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, Department of Justice, the US Treasury, and RAND, as well as universities, such as London Business School, and Harvard University. Dr. Hensel is also a frequent presenter at conferences, including the USAF Air and Space Technology Exposition, the NBER National Security Working Group, the National Association for Business Economists (NABE) annual conference, the Western Economics Association, the Midwestern Economics Association, and the European Financial Management Association.

In 2011, airlines have been contending with rapidly climbing jet-fuel prices that have outpaced crude-oil prices to reach their highest level since September 2008. As of March 4, U.S. Gulf Coast jet fuel sold for $3.20 per gallon. Excluding hedge gains or losses, if U.S. airlines had to contend with $3 per gallon jet-fuel prices for all of 2011, their fuel bill would increase $15 billion, from $39 billion in 2010 to an estimated $54 billion in 2011. Mr. Heimlich will discuss how structural increases in the cost of energy over the past two decades are transforming the industry and what it means for revenue generation, domestic seating capacity, and the global competitive landscape. Mr. Heimlich will field questions on the airlines’ quest for sustained profitability and positive returns on invested capital.

UPDATE: Slides from the talk may be downloaded here: Heimlich slides (PDF).