A citizen of France, Olivier Blanchard has spent his professional life in Cambridge, U.S. After obtaining his Ph.D in economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1977, he taught at Harvard University, returning to MIT in 1982, where he has been since then. He is the Class of 1941 Professor of Economics, and past Chair of the Economics Department. He is currently on leave from MIT, as Economic Counsellor and Director of the Research Department of the International Monetary Fund.

He is a macroeconomist, who has worked on a wide set of issues, from the role of monetary policy, to the nature of speculative bubbles, to the nature of the labor market and the determinants of unemployment, to transition in former communist countries. In the process, he has worked with numerous countries and international organizations. He is the author of many books and articles, including two textbooks in macroeconomics, one at the graduate level with Stanley Fischer, one at the undergraduate level.

He is a fellow and Council member of the Econometric Society, a past vice president of the American Economic Association, and a member of the American Academy of Sciences.

• Date: May 17, 2012
• Time: 12:00 noon to 1:30pm
• Where: Chinatown Garden, 618 H St NW Washington, DC
• Cost: $16 for members, $25 for non-members (includes lunch)
• Reservations: Click here
• Metro: Gallery Place (red/green lines)

In her presentation, Ms. Wolff will discuss the status of the federal elections and implications for the banking industry.  She will also provide an update on the regulatory reforms impacting the banking industry.

At Citigroup, Ms. Wolff is responsible for the company’s government affairs globally, including U.S. Federal and State government relations and international government relations.

Prior to joining Citigroup in May 2011, Ms. Wolff was a partner in the Legislative and Policy Practice at the law firm of Hogan Lovells where she represented clients in legislative matters before the Congress and the Administration.

Ms. Wolff has more than 20 years of government relations experience in key public and private sector positions.  Most notably from January 2005 to December 2007, Ms. Wolff served in the White House as the Assistant to the President for Legislative Affairs.

The Society of Government Economists is proud to announce a call for papers for two conferences.

SGE Annual Conference in Washington, DC

Co-sponsored by the Economics Department of George Washington University

November 5-6, 2012

Washington, DC

Among the distinguished speakers at the conference will be Dr. Natwar Gandhi, the Independent Chief Financial Officer for the District of Columbia; and Professor Barry Chiswick, Chair of the Economics Department, George Washington University.  (The availability of several other distinguished speakers has yet to be confirmed at this time.)

and

SGE Sessions at the Annual Conference of the Allied Social Science Associations /

American Economic Association

January 4-6, 2013

San Diego, CA

Please download either a Word version or pdf version of the call for papers. There is no fee for submitting an application for paper presentations or for entire sessions. However, applications will only be accepted from current SGE members or from individuals purchasing a membership (for $25 per year) in their application. (Anyone can join SGE who shares our interest in the work of government economists.) Applications for conference papers and sessions may be made simultaneously to both conferences, by filling a single application form.  If the application is made to both, and is accepted to both, then it is expected that the presentations will be made at both conferences.

* The deadline for submitting proposed papers or sessions for the AEA conference is May 15, 2012; however, the deadline for SGE-only papers and sessions is September 30, 2012.

Note Location: NAM  Offices, 1331 Pennsylvania Ave, Suite 600. Metro stop: Metro Center or Federal Triangle.

William Gale is the Arjay and Frances Miller Chair in Federal Economic Policy in the Economic Studies Program at the Brookings Institution.  His research focuses on tax policy, fiscal policy, pensions and saving behavior.  He is co-director of the Tax Policy Center, a joint venture of the Brookings Institution and the Urban Institute.  He is also director of the Retirement Security Project.  From 2006 to 2009, he served as Vice President of Brookings and Director of the Economic Studies Program.  Gale attended Duke University and the London School of Economics and received his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1987.

SGE is an all-volunteer group and depends on the willingness of its members to continue on its mission: to support the professional development of government economists, and those who are interested in public policy economics, by providing them with research, publication, and professional communication opportunities. Serving on the Board and helping to obtain speakers, set up the annual conference, or otherwise support the organization is a great way to promote the cause of public policy economics.

The following positions are available:

• President
• Vice-President
• Executive Secretary
• At-large Board Member

Descriptions of the positions are available at http://www.sge-econ.org/about/bylaws/#articleVI.

Dr. Palley was formerly Chief Economist with the US – China Economic and Security Review Commission. Prior to joining the Commission he was Director of the Open Society Institute’s Globalization Reform Project, and before that he was Assistant Director of Public Policy at the AFL-CIO.

Dr. Palley is the author of Plenty of Nothing: The Downsizing of the American Dream and the Case for Structural Keynesianism (Princeton University Press) and Post Keynesian Economics (Macmillan Press). His latest book, From Financial Crisis to Stagnation: The Destruction of Shared Prosperity and the Role of Economics is being published by Cambridge University Press in February 2012. He has published in numerous academic journals, and has written for The Atlantic Monthly, American Prospect and Nation magazines. He holds a B.A. degree from Oxford University and a M.A. degree in International Relations and Ph.D. in Economics, both from Yale University.

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.