IMF
Please send us your feedback

Conference

Sixteenth Jacques Polak Annual Research Conference: "Unconventional Monetary and Exchange Rate Policies"

Washington, DC, HQ2, Conference Hall 1

November 5-6, 2015


The International Monetary Fund will hold the Sixteenth Jacques Polak Annual Research Conference at its headquarters in Washington DC on November 5–6, 2015.

The theme of this year's conference is "Unconventional Monetary and Exchange Rate Policies." The conference is intended to provide a forum for discussing innovative research and to facilitate the exchange of views among researchers and policymakers. Ben Bernanke (Brookings Institution) will deliver the Mundell-Fleming Lecture.

The conference is open to the public and registration is required. To register for the conference (registration will include all conference sessions, the Mundell-Fleming Lecture, and the Economic Forum) please use the registration link. Please note that registration for the conference will close on Friday, October 30, 2015. Registered attendees will be required to present photo identification on entering the IMF at 1900 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W., Washington D.C. For questions regarding the conference, please send an email to ARC@imf.org.

Please note that, for this event, invitations for visa purposes will be extended only to the conference participants.

Thursday, November 5, 2015
8:00-9:00am

Registration and Continental Breakfast

9:00-9:15am

Opening Remarks

Watch the Video

Maurice Obstfeld, Economic Counsellor and Director, Research Department, IMF

Maurice Obstfeld was born in New York City in 1952. Since September 2015, he has been the Economic Counsellor and Director of Research at the International Monetary Fund, on leave from the University of California, Berkeley. At Berkeley, he is the Class of 1958 Professor of Economics and formerly Chair of the Department of Economics (1998-2001). He arrived at Berkeley in 1991 as a professor, following permanent appointments at Columbia (1979-1986) and the University of Pennsylvania (1986-1989), and a visiting appointment at Harvard (1989-90). He received his Ph.D. in economics from MIT in 1979 after attending the University of Pennsylvania (B.A., 1973) and King’s College, Cambridge University (M.A., 1975). From July 2014 to August 2015, Dr. Obstfeld served as a Member of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers. He was previously (2002-2014) an honorary advisor to the Bank of Japan's Institute of Monetary and Economic Studies. He is a Fellow of the Econometric Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Among Dr. Obstfeld's honors are Tilburg University’s Tjalling Koopmans Asset Award, the John von Neumann Award of the Rajk Laszlo College of Advanced Studies (Budapest), and the Kiel Institute’s Bernhard Harms Prize. He has given a number distinguished lectures, including the American Economic Association’s annual Richard T. Ely Lecture, the L. K. Jha Memorial Lecture of the Reserve Bank of India, and the Frank Graham Memorial Lecture at Princeton. Dr. Obstfeld has served both on the Executive Committee and as Vice President of the American Economic Association. He has consulted and taught at the IMF and numerous central banks around the world. He is also the co-author of two leading textbooks on international economics, International Economics (10th edition, 2014, with Paul Krugman and Marc Melitz) and Foundations of International Macroeconomics (1996, with Kenneth Rogoff), as well as more than 100 research articles on exchange rates, international financial crises, global capital markets, and monetary policy.

9:15-10:45am

Session 1: Central Bank Balance Sheet as a Policy Instrument

Watch the Video

Chair:
Jonathan D. Ostry, Deputy Director, Research Department, IMF

Jonathan D. Ostry is Deputy Director of the Research Department (RES) at the International Monetary Fund. His recent responsibilities include leading staff teams on: IMF-FSB Early Warning Exercises on global systemic macrofinancial risks; vulnerabilities exercises for advanced and emerging market countries; multilateral exchange rate surveillance, including the work of CGER, the Fund’s Consultative Group of Exchange Rates, and EBA, the External Balance Assessment; international financial architecture and reform of the IMF’s lending toolkit; capital account management (capital controls and prudential tools to manage capital inflows) and financial globalization issues; fiscal sustainability issues; and the nexus between income inequality and economic growth. Past positions include leading the division that produces the IMF’s flagship multilateral surveillance publication, the World Economic Outlook, and leading country teams on Australia, Japan, New Zealand and Singapore. Mr. Ostry is the author/editor of a number of books on international macro policy issues, and numerous articles in scholarly journals. His work has been widely cited in the press, including the Economist, the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Business Week, and National Public Radio. He earned his B.A. (with distinction) from Queen's University (Canada) at age 18, and went on to earn a B.A. and M.A. from Oxford University (Balliol College), and graduate degrees from the London School of Economics (M.Sc., 1984) and the University Chicago (Ph.D., 1988). He is listed in Who's Who in Economics (2003).

The Case for Monetary Finance – An Essentially Political Issue
Paper | Presentation
Adair Turner (Institute for New Economic Thinking)

Lord Turner has been a Senior Fellow at the Institute for New Economic Thinking since 2013, and in 2015 became Chairman of the Institute’s Governing Body. Prior to that he chaired the UK Financial Services Authority from 2008 until 2013, during which time he played a leading role in the redesign of the global banking and shadow banking regulation as Chairman of the International Financial Stability Board’s major policy committee.
Lord Turner has combined a business career with public policy and academia. He led the McKinsey practice in East Europe and Russia in the early 1990s, and was Director General of the CBI (Confederation of British Industry) 1995-2000. He was Vice-Chairman of Merrill Lynch Europe (2000-06) and a Non-Executive Director of a number of companies, including Standard Chartered plc (2006-08). In 2015 he joined the Board of UK start-up bank OakNorth.
He became a cross-bench member of the House of Lords in 2005; served as the first Chairman of the Climate Change Committee (2008-12), and chaired the Pensions Commission (2003-06) and the Low Pay Commission (2002-06). He has also been a Trustee of the British Museum since 2013. His publications include ‘Just Capital-The Liberal Economy’ (2001); ‘Economics After the Crisis’ (2012); and ‘Between Debt and the Devil: Money, Credit and Fixing Global Finance’ (Princeton 2015). He is Senior Fellow at the Centre for Financial Studies (Frankfurt); a visiting professor at London School of Economics, Cass Business School and City University; and as of recently, Visiting Fellow at the People’s Bank of China School of Finance, Tsighua University (Beijing); and Visiting Professor at the International Center for Islamic Finance (INCEIF) in Kuala Lumpur.


Discussant: Lars Svensson (Stockholm School of Economics and IMF) | Presentation

Professor Lars E.O. Svensson is Visiting Professor at the Stockholm School of Economics since May 2013. During 2015 he is Research Scholar at the Research Department, International Monetary Fund, Washington, DC. He is Affiliated Professor at IIES – The Institute for International Economic Studies, Stockholm University, since June 2009. He was Deputy Governor of Sveriges Riksbank (the central bank of Sweden) during May 2007- May 2013, Professor of Economics at Princeton University during 2001-2009, and Professor of International Economics at the Institute for International Economic Studies, Stockholm University during 1984-2003. He has published extensively in scholarly journals on monetary economics and monetary policy, exchange-rate theory and policy, and general international macroeconomics. He has lectured and visited at universities, central banks, and international organizations in many countries. He received his Ph.D. in economics from Stockholm University.
He received the Great Gold Medal of the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences in 2012. He is a foreign honorary member of the American Economic Association, a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, a member of Academia Europaea, a foreign member of the Finnish Academy of Science and Letters, a foreign honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, an honorary member of the Latin American and Caribbean Economic Association, a fellow of the Econometric Society, a fellow of the European Economic Association, a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, and a research fellow of the Centre for Economic Policy Research, London. He was chair of the Prize Committee for the Alfred Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences during 1999-2001, member during 1993-2002, and secretary during 1988-1992.
He was active as advisor to Sveriges Riksbank during 1990-2007 and was a member of the Monetary Policy Advisory Board and the Economic Advisory Panel of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York from 2004 until his appointment as Deputy Governor of the Riksbank. He has regularly consulted for international, U.S., and Swedish agencies and organizations. In 2000-2001 he undertook a review of monetary policy in New Zealand, commissioned by the New Zealand government, and in 2002 he chaired a committee reviewing monetary policy in Norway.

Non-Neutrality of Open-Market Operations
Paper | Presentation
Pierpaolo Benigno (LUISS Guido Carli and EIEF) and Salvatore Nisticò (Sapienza University of Rome)

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 co-editor of the International Journal of Central Banking.


Discussant: David Archer (BIS) | Presentation

Mr Archer is the Head of the Central Banking Studies unit at the Bank for International Settlements. He is also the Secretary to the Central Bank Governance Group, a group of Governors that meets regularly in Basel to consider issues relating to the organisation and governance of central banks.
He has been with the BIS for 10 years.
Prior to joining the BIS, Mr Archer was Assistant Governor at the Reserve Bank of New Zealand. For the last 5 years of his time with the Reserve Bank he was responsible for monetary policy analysis and advice, forecasting, and research. For the 5 years before that he was responsible for the Bank’s financial market activities, including foreign reserve management. He was a member of the Bank’s Governor’s Committee (the peak executive committee), Monetary Policy Committee, Financial System Oversight Committee, and Risk Management Committee.
During his time at the Reserve Bank, the focus, governance, organisation and management of the institution was comprehensively reshaped, with a number of innovative legislative and operational features being introduced. For a number of years in the late 1980s Mr Archer was seconded to the International Monetary Fund, where he was a desk economist in the European Department.

10:45-11:00am

*** Coffee Break ***

11:00-12:30pm

Session 2: Macroeconomic Effects of UMP

Watch the Video

Chair:
Gian Maria Milesi-Ferretti, Deputy Director, Research Department, IMF

Gian Maria Milesi-Ferretti is Deputy Director in the Research Department of the International Monetary Fund. He is responsible for supervising the department work on multilateral surveillance, including the World Economic Outlook and the Spillover Report. He was previously a Deputy Director in the Western Hemisphere Department and IMF mission chief to the United States. He received his undergraduate degree in economics from Università di Roma La Sapienza in 1985 and his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1991. He joined the London School of Economics thereafter, and moved to the IMF in 1993.
He has published extensively in refereed journals in the areas of international capital flows, international financial integration, current account sustainability, capital controls, taxation and growth, and political economy. His paper “The External Wealth of Nations Mark II” (joint with Philip Lane) recently won the Bhagwati award as best paper published in the Journal of International Economics during 2007-2008. Since 1996 he is a Research Fellow of the London-based Center for Economic Policy Research (CEPR).

Measuring the Macroeconomic Impact of Monetary Policy at the Zero Lower Bound
Paper | Presentation
Jing Cynthia Wu (Chicago Booth and NBER) and Fan Dora Xia (Merrill Lynch)

Dora Xia is a US rates strategist at Bank of America Merrill Lynch. She obtained a Ph.D in economics from UC San Diego. Her dissertation studied the relationship between the term structure of interest rates, monetary policy, and the macroeconomy.


Discussant: Borağan Aruoba | Presentation (University of Maryland)

Dr. Aruoba is an associate professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Maryland. He started at the university in 2004 as an assistant professor and became an associate professor in 2011.
Dr. Aruoba is a macroeconomist with both theoretical and empirical interests. On the theoretical front, his recent research focuses on the dynamics of an economy when it is at the zero lower bound of nominal interest rates and in general nonlinearities in macroeconomic models. On the empirical front, he has worked on understanding statistical properties of data revisions, the yield curve and factor models. His work on an index for tracking business cycles and a new measure of GDP was implemented by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia.
His research has been published in the Journal of Economic Theory, Journal of Monetary Economics, American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, Journal of Econometrics and the Journal of Business and Economic Statistics.

The Macroeconomic Effects of the Federal Reserve’s Unconventional Monetary Policies
Paper | Presentation
Eric M. Engen (Federal Reserve Board),

Eric Engen is a Senior Associate Director in the Research and Statistics Division at the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, where he oversees the Macroeconomic and Quantitative Studies section, the Current Macroeconomic Conditions section, the Fiscal Analysis section, and the Industrial Output section. His work for the Board and his economic research focuses on macroeconomics, monetary policy, and fiscal policy. Before joining the Board staff in 1993, Engen was an assistant professor in the Department of Economics at UCLA and a faculty research fellow with the National Bureau of Economic Research. He earned his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Virginia.


Thomas Laubach (Federal Reserve Board), and
David Reifschneider (Federal Reserve Board)

David Reifschneider received his PhD in economics from the University of Wisconsin in 1982. That same year, he joined the staff of the Federal Reserve Board in Washington, D.C., where he was employed until his retirement as a Deputy Director of the Research and Statistics Division in the fall of 2013. During his tenure at the Board, he worked primarily in the areas of economic forecasting, macro modelling, and monetary and fiscal policy analysis. He now divides his time between Maine and Washington, balancing the rural life with serving as a special policy advisor to the Chair of the Federal Reserve and the other Board members.


Discussant: Douglas Laxton | Presentation (IMF)

Doug Laxton completed graduate work in economics in 1981 at the University of Western Ontario. He held numerous positions in the Research Department at the Bank of Canada for 13 years (1981-1993) and was responsible for developing their modeling framework to support Inflation Targeting. In 1993, Laxton joined the Research Department of the IMF and currently is Division Chief of the Economic Modeling Division (EMD). EMD is responsible for developing modern macro models to support the Fund's surveillance activities. Laxton has worked with many central banks over the years developing Forecasting and Policy Analysis Systems to support Inflation-Forecast Targeting frameworks. He published many papers on a large range of topics, but spends most of his time at the Fund building multi-country models to support the Fund’s surveillance activities. More recently, he has been working on models with strong macro-financial linkages designed to support macroprudential policies.

12:35-2:10pm

*** Lunch***

(By invitation only, HQ2, Conference Hall 2)


Luncheon Remarks by Eswar Prasad (Cornell University and the Brookings Institution)

Watch the Video

Eswar Prasad is the Tolani Senior Professor of Trade Policy and Professor of Economics at Cornell University. He is also a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, where he holds the New Century Chair in International Economics, and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He is a former head of the IMF's China Division. His latest book is The Dollar Trap: How the U.S. Dollar Tightened Its Grip on Global Finance (Princeton University Press, February 2014). His previous book, Emerging Markets: Resilience and Growth Amid Global Turmoil, was published in December 2010 (with M. Ayhan Kose; Brookings Institution Press). He has co-authored and edited numerous other books and monographs, including on financial regulation and on China and India. Prasad has testified before the Senate Finance Committee, the House of Representatives Committee on Financial Services, and the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission. He serves on an Advisory Committee to India's Finance Minister and is the Lead Academic for the DFID-LSE International Growth Center's India Growth Research Program. He is the creator of the Brookings-Financial Times world index (TIGER: Tracking Indices for the Global Economic Recovery; www.ft.com/tiger). His op-ed articles have been published in the Financial Times, Harvard Business Review, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post.

2:15-3:45pm

Session 3: UMP and Financial Stability

Watch the Video

Chair:
José Viñals, Financial Counsellor, Director of the Monetary and Capital Markets Department, IMF

José Viñals is the Financial Counsellor and Director of the Monetary and Capital Markets Department of the International Monetary Fund. He is a member of the Financial Stability Board, representing the IMF. Before this, he served as the Deputy Governor of the Central Bank of Spain after holding successive positions. He has also been Chairman of the ECB’s International Relations Committee; and Chairman of Spain’s Deposit Guarantee Funds. He holds a Ph.D in Economics from Harvard. He is a former Faculty Member of the Economics Department at Stanford.

The Hunt for Duration: Not Waving but Drowning?
Paper
Dietrich Domanski (BIS), Hyun Song Shin (BIS), and Vladyslav Sushko (BIS)

Dietrich Domanski is Head of Policy Analysis in the Monetary and Economic Department at the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) in Basel. He oversees the preparation of the regular meetings of central bank governors at the BIS and of the central bank committees hosted by the BIS. Before joining the BIS in 2000, Dietrich headed the capital markets group in the Economics Department of the Bundesbank. He also worked as IMF Advisor to Bank Indonesia during the Asian crisis. At the BIS, Dietrich was in charge of the macroeconomic analysis unit (from 2005-07) and was Secretary to the Committee on the Global Financial System (CGFS) from September 2007 until August 2010. Dietrich has published on a range of financial stability issues in German and English. His main research interests include the interaction of monetary policy, financial markets and the real economy, and the role of financial intermediation in economic development.


Discussant: Sergio Schmukler | Presentation (World Bank)

Sergio Schmukler is Lead Economist at the World Bank’s Development Economics Research Group. His research area is international finance and international financial markets and institutions. In particular, he works on emerging market finance, financial globalization, financial crises and contagion, financial development, and institutional investor behavior. Dr. Schmukler obtained his Ph.D. in Economics from the University of California at Berkeley in 1997, when he joined the World Bank's Young Economist and Young Professionals Programs. He has also been Treasurer of LACEA-the Latin America and Caribbean Economic Association (since 2004), Associate Editor of the Journal of Development Economics (2001-04), taught at the Department of Economics, University of Maryland (1999-2003), and worked at the International Monetary Fund Research Department (2004-05). Dr. Schmukler also worked at the U.S. Federal Reserve Board, the Inter-American Development Bank Research Department, the Argentine Central Bank, and visited the Dutch Central Bank, the Hong Kong Institute for Monetary Research of the Hong Kong Monetary Authority, CREI at Universitat Pompeu Fabra, and the Bank for International Settlements.

Whatever it Takes: The Real Effects of Unconventional Monetary Policy
Paper | Presentation
Viral V. Acharya (NYU Stern), Tim Eisert (Erasmus University Rotterdam), Christian Eufinger (IESE Business School), and Christian Hirsch (Goethe University Frankfurt)

Tim Eisert is currently an Assistant Professor of Finance at the Erasmus School of Economics, Erasmus University Rotterdam, The Netherlands and an Associate Member of the Erasmus Institute of Management. Tim obtained his Bachelor of Science in 2009 and his Ph.D. in Finance in 2014 from Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany. In 2013/14 he was a visiting scholar at New York University’s Stern School of Business. His research focuses on financial intermediation, sovereign debt crises, and financial crises.


Discussant: Luc Laeven (European Central Bank) | Presentation

Luc Laeven is the Director-General of the General Research Directorate of the European Central Bank. Prior to this he was the Lead Economist of the Research Department of the International Monetary Fund and he has also worked at the World Bank. His research focuses on banking and international finance issues, and has been widely published in top academic journals, including the American Economic Review, Journal of Finance, Journal of Financial Economics, and Review of Financial Studies. He has also published books on Systemic Risk, Crises and Macroprudential Regulation (MIT Press), Completing the Eurozone Rescue: What More Needs To Be Done ? (VoxEU E-book), Systemic Financial Crises: Containment and Resolution (Cambridge University Press), Deposit Insurance Around the World: Issues of Design and Implementation (MIT Press), and A Reader on International Corporate Finance. He is a Chaired Professor of Finance at CentER, Tilburg University, Research Fellow of the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR) in London and a Research Associate at the European Corporate Governance Institute (ECGI). He studied economics and finance at Tilburg University, the University of Amsterdam, and the London School of Economics.

3:45-4:00pm

*** Coffee Break ***

4:00-5:30pm

Mundell-Fleming Lecture

Paper | Watch the Video | Presentation

Federal Reserve Policy in an International Context
Ben Bernanke (Brookings Institution)

Ben S. Bernanke is a Distinguished Fellow in Residence with the Economic Studies Program at the Brookings Institution. From February 2006 through January 2014, he was Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. Dr. Bernanke also served as Chairman of the Federal Open Market Committee, the System's principal monetary policymaking body.

Introduction by:
Maurice Obstfeld (Economic Counsellor and Director, Research Department, IMF)

Maurice Obstfeld was born in New York City in 1952. Since September 2015, he has been the Economic Counsellor and Director of Research at the International Monetary Fund, on leave from the University of California, Berkeley. At Berkeley, he is the Class of 1958 Professor of Economics and formerly Chair of the Department of Economics (1998-2001). He arrived at Berkeley in 1991 as a professor, following permanent appointments at Columbia (1979-1986) and the University of Pennsylvania (1986-1989), and a visiting appointment at Harvard (1989-90). He received his Ph.D. in economics from MIT in 1979 after attending the University of Pennsylvania (B.A., 1973) and King’s College, Cambridge University (M.A., 1975). From July 2014 to August 2015, Dr. Obstfeld served as a Member of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers. He was previously (2002-2014) an honorary advisor to the Bank of Japan's Institute of Monetary and Economic Studies. He is a Fellow of the Econometric Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Among Dr. Obstfeld's honors are Tilburg University’s Tjalling Koopmans Asset Award, the John von Neumann Award of the Rajk Laszlo College of Advanced Studies (Budapest), and the Kiel Institute’s Bernhard Harms Prize. He has given a number distinguished lectures, including the American Economic Association’s annual Richard T. Ely Lecture, the L. K. Jha Memorial Lecture of the Reserve Bank of India, and the Frank Graham Memorial Lecture at Princeton. Dr. Obstfeld has served both on the Executive Committee and as Vice President of the American Economic Association. He has consulted and taught at the IMF and numerous central banks around the world. He is also the co-author of two leading textbooks on international economics, International Economics (10th edition, 2014, with Paul Krugman and Marc Melitz) and Foundations of International Macroeconomics (1996, with Kenneth Rogoff), as well as more than 100 research articles on exchange rates, international financial crises, global capital markets, and monetary policy.

Friday, November 6, 2015
8:15-9:00am

Registration and Continental Breakfast

9:00-10:30am

Session 4: Unconventional Policies in EMEs

Watch the Video

Chair:
Alejandro Werner, Director, Western Hemisphere Department, IMF

Alejandro Werner assumed his current position as Director of the Western Hemisphere Department of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in January 2013. A Mexican citizen, Mr. Werner has had distinguished careers in the public and private sectors as well as in academia. Most recently, he served as Undersecretary of Finance and Public Credit of Mexico from Dec. 2006 until August 2010, was Professor of Economics at the Instituto de Empresa in Madrid Spain (from August 2010-July 2011), and Head of Corporate and Investment banking at BBVA-Bancomer (from August 2011 until end-2012). Previously he was Director of Economic Studies at the Bank of Mexico and professor at ITAM. He has published widely. Mr. Werner was named Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum in 2007. Mr. Werner received his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1994.

Direct and Spillover Effects of Unconventional Monetary and Exchange Rate Policies
Paper | Presentation
Tamim Bayoumi (IMF), Joseph Gagnon (Peterson Institute), Juan-Miguel Londono-Yarce (Federal Reserve Board), Christian Saborowski (IMF), and Horacio Sapriza (Federal Reserve Board)

Joseph E. Gagnon is senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics since September 2009. Previously, he was visiting associate director, Division of Monetary Affairs (2008–09) at the US Federal Reserve Board. He also served at the US Federal Reserve Board as associate director, Division of International Finance (1999–2008), and senior economist (1987–1990 and 1991–97). He has served at the US Treasury Department (1994–95 and 1997–1999) and has taught at the Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley (1990–91). He is author of Flexible Exchange Rates for a Stable World Economy (2011) and The Global Outlook for Government Debt over the Next 25 years: Implications for the Economy and Public Policy (2011). He has published numerous articles in economics journals, including the Journal of International Economics, the Journal of Monetary Economics, the Review of International Economics, and the Journal of International Money and Finance, and has contributed to several edited volumes. He received a BA from Harvard University in 1981 and a PhD in economics from Stanford University in 1987.


Discussant: Carlos Vegh (Johns Hopkins University) | Presentation

Carlos A. Vegh is the Fred H. Sanderson Professor of International Economics at SAIS (Johns Hopkins University), and holds a joint appointment with the Economics Department. He is also a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution. He received his Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Chicago in 1987 and spent the early years of his career at the IMF’s Research Department. From 1995 to 2013, he was a tenured professor first at UCLA and then at the University of Maryland. He has been co-editor of the Journal of International Economics and the Journal of Development Economics, the leading journals in their respective fields. He has published extensively in leading academic journals on monetary and fiscal policy in developing and emerging countries. He has co-edited a volume in honor of Guillermo Calvo (MIT Press) and published a graduate textbook on open economy macroeconomics for developing countries (MIT Press).

Financial Frictions and Unconventional Monetary Policy in Emerging Economies
Paper | Presentation
Roberto Chang (Rutgers University) and Andrés Velasco (Columbia University)

Roberto Chang is a Professor of Economics at Rutgers University, the State University of New Jersey, and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Before joining Rutgers, he was an Assistant Professor at New York University and a Research Officer at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. He has also taught at Princeton and Columbia. Professor Chang has published extensively on monetary economics, exchange rate policy, and financial crises. He has written on the dynamics and credibility of monetary policy; the links between banking panics, exchange rate regimes, and currency crashes; and the macroeconomic impacts of balance sheet effects, currency mismatches, and financial frictions. He has served in the editorial boards of the Journal of International Economics and the Journal of Development Economics, and as a member of the Economics Panel of the National Science Foundation. He is a frequent visitor, consultant, and advisor to international financial organizations and central banks around the world.


Discussant: Marcos Chamon (IMF) | Presentation

Marcos Chamon is a Deputy Division Chief in the Systemic Issues Division of the Research Department (RES) of the International Monetary Fund. He has worked on a wide range of topics related to international finance, including problems related to sovereign debt structure, and restructuring, liability denomination, currency mismatches, indexation of debt, the international financial architecture, country insurance, methodologies to assess vulnerabilities in emerging markets and advanced economies, consumption and savings in China, post-reform growth in Latin America, currency composition of reserves, the emerging market’s policy responses to the Global Financial Crisis, the design of capital controls and macro prudential policies, and monetary policy and foreign exchange intervention in emerging markets. Prior to joining the Fund, he obtained a Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard University in 2003.

10:30-10:45am

*** Coffee Break ***

10:45-1:00pm

Session 5: Global UMP

Watch the Video

Chair:
Vitor Gaspar, Director, Fiscal Affairs Department, IMF

Vitor Gaspar, a Portuguese national, is Director of the Fiscal Affairs Department of the International Monetary Fund. Prior to joining the IMF, he held a variety of senior policy positions in Banco de Portugal, including most recently as Special Adviser. He served as Minister of State and Finance of Portugal during 2011-2013. He was head of the European Commission’s Bureau of European Policy Advisers during 2007-2010 and director-general of research at the European Central Bank from 1998 to 2004. Mr. Gaspar holds a Ph.D. and a post-doctoral agregado in Economics from Universidade Nova de Lisboa; he also studied at Universidade Católica Portuguesa.

The Spillovers, Interactions, and (Un)Intended Consequences of Monetary and Regulatory Policies
Paper
Kristin Forbes (MIT and Bank of England), Dennis Reinhardt (Bank of England), and Tomasz Wieladek (Bank of England)

Tomasz Wieladek is currently programme manager, responsible for research on the interaction of monetary and macroprudential policy, in the research hub at the Bank of England. Prior to his current appointment, he was a senior research manager in the Bank’s stress-testing division, an adviser to external members of the UK's monetary policy committee and also worked in the International Finance Division at the Bank of England. He holds a PhD in International Economics from the Graduate Institute, Geneva and an MPhil from the University of Cambridge, UK. His research interests include international finance, monetary economics and applied econometrics. He is a CEPR Research Affiliate and his research has been published in outlets such as The Journal of The European Economic Association, The Journal of Finance, The Journal of Financial Economics and The Journal of Money, Credit and Banking.


Discussant: Enrica Detragiache (IMF) | Presentation

Enrica Detragiache is Assistant Director in the European Department of the International Monetary Fund. She is currently the mission chief for Germany and coordinates work on financial sector issues. She has been at the IMF since 1995. In addition to the European Department, she has worked in the Research Department and IMF Institute. Before joining the Fund, she was on the faculty in the Economics Department at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. Throughout her career, she authored several research papers on a wide range of topics, including banking and financial crises, corporate finance, labor migration, and development economics. Her papers have been published in major academic journals, such as the American Economic Review, the Journal of Finance, the Journal of Monetary Economics, the Journal of Development Economics, and the Journal of Money, Credit, and Banking. She holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Pennsylvania and an undergraduate degree from the University of Turin, Italy.

Unconventional Monetary Policy and International Risk Premia
Paper | Presentation
John Rogers (Federal Reserve Board), Chiara Scotti (Federal Reserve Board), and Jonathan H. Wright (Johns Hopkins University)

John Rogers is a Senior Adviser in the International Finance Division of the Federal Reserve Board. He received his BA from the University of Delaware and PhD in economics from the University of Virginia. John was on the economics department faculty at Penn State University, where he rose to Associate Professor in 1996. He began working on the Fed’s multi-country model in the Trade & Financial Studies section, and became section chief in 2003. John is the author of several academic publications in international finance and macroeconomics. He continues to teach those subjects as an adjunct professor in the economics department at Georgetown University. John is the father of four children.


Discussant: Charles Engel (University of Wisconsin) | Presentation

Charles Engel is the Donald Hester Professor of Economics at the University of Wisconsin – Madison, which he joined in 2000. He has previously held positions at the University of Washington and the University of Virginia.
He is also a Research Associate for the National Bureau of Economic Research; a Research Affiliate at the Research Centre for International Economics, City University of Hong Kong; a member of the Advisory Board, Center for Applied Macroeconomic Analysis (Australia and New Zealand); Senior Fellow, Globalization and Monetary Policy Institute, Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas; and an International Research Fellow, Kiel Institute, Kiel, Germany.
Since 2001, he has been Editor of the Journal of International Economics, the leading academic journal in the field of international economics.
He has frequently been a Visiting Scholar at the Federal Reserve Board, the International Monetary Fund, the European Central Bank, and central banks in several countries including England, France, the Netherlands, Hong Kong, Singapore, Serbia, Uruguay and Chile. He is a regular Visiting Scholar at the Federal Reserve Banks of San Francisco, Philadelphia, and Dallas.
His research is in the area of international macroeconomics and international finance. He has published articles in the American Economic Review, the Journal of Political Economy, the Journal of Monetary Economics, the Journal of International Economics and other publications.

Global Impact of US and Euro Area Unconventional Monetary Policies: A Comparison
Paper
Qianying Chen (IMF), Marco Lombardi (BIS), Alex Ross (University of Cambridge), and Feng Zhu (BIS)

Dr. Feng Zhu joined the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) in 2004. He is currently Senior Economist at the BIS Representative Office for Asia and the Pacific in Hong Kong. Previously he was a dissertation fellow at the Research Department, US Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, Missouri; visiting scholar at the Department of Economics, Princeton University, New Jersey; and an intern economist at the Research Department, International Monetary Fund (IMF) in Washington, D.C. Dr. Zhu holds Masters and PhD degrees in Economics from Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, and M.Sc in Econometrics and Mathematical Economics, from London School of Economics and Political Science.


Discussant: Esteban Vesperoni (IMF) | Presentation

Esteban Vesperoni is deputy chief at the Multilateral Surveillance Division of the Research Department at the International Monetary Fund. He has previously worked in economies in Latin America, Europe and Central Asia; and as IMF resident representative. At the Fund, he has also worked on fiscal, debt sustainability, and debt restructuring issues. Previously, he has hold positions as economist in the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, analyst at the ministry of Finance in Argentina and consultant at the World Bank. He has taught at the University of Buenos Aires and the University Torcuato Di Tella in Argentina. He received a PhD in Economics from the University of Maryland at College Park. His main research interests are in open economy macroeconomics, with particular focus on exchange rates, capital flows, and credit. His recent topics of research focus on the analysis of spillovers to emerging markets from real and monetary shocks in systemic economies.

1:05-2:25pm

*** Lunch***

(By invitation only, HQ2, Conference Hall 2)
2:30-4:00pm

Session 6: QE Exit and the Future of QE

Watch the Video

Chair:
David Lipton , First Deputy Managing Director, IMF

Mr. David Lipton assumed the position of First Deputy Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund on September 1, 2011. He served as a Special Advisor to the Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund starting July 26, 2011 before assuming his duties as First Deputy Managing Director.
Before coming to the Fund, Mr. Lipton was Special Assistant to the President, and served as Senior Director for International Economic Affairs at the National Economic Council and National Security Council at the White House.
Previously, Lipton was a Managing Director at Citi, where he was Head of Global Country Risk Management. In that capacity, he chaired Citi’s Country Risk Committee, worked for the Senior Risk Officer, and advised senior management on global risk issues.
Prior to joining Citi in May 2005, he spent five years at Moore Capital Management, a global hedge fund and, before that, a year at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Lipton served in the Clinton administration at the Treasury Department from 1993 to 1998. As Under Secretary of the Treasury for International Affairs — and before that as Assistant Secretary – Lipton helped lead the Treasury’s response to the financial crisis in Asia and the effort to modernize the international financial architecture.
Before joining the Clinton administration, Lipton was a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center of Scholars.
From 1989 to 1992, he teamed up with Prof. Jeffrey Sachs then at Harvard University, working as economic advisers to the governments of Russia, Poland and Slovenia during their transitions to capitalism.
Lipton began his career with eight years on the staff of the International Monetary Fund, working on economic stabilization issues in emerging market and poor countries.
Lipton earned a Ph.d. and M.A. from Harvard University in 1982 and a B.A. from Wesleyan University in 1975.

QE in the Future: The Central Bank’s Balance Sheet in a Fiscal Crisis
Paper | Presentation
Ricardo Reis (Columbia University)

Ricardo Reis is a professor of economics at Columbia University, on leave at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and a senior George fellow at the Bank of England. He received his B.Sc. degree from the LSE in 1999 and his Ph.D. from Harvard in 2004. He is affiliated with the NBER and the CEPR, and he is an academic advisor at the Federal Reserve Banks of New York and Richmond. He is the chief editor of the Journal of Monetary Economics and sits on the editorial boards of the Journal of Economic Literature and the Economic Journal. His main area of research is macroeconomics, both theoretical and applied. Some of his past work focused on theories of inattention, models of sticky information, inflation dynamics, price indices, and the study of monetary and fiscal policy. Current work investigates the role of fiscal automatic stabilizers, the financial strength of central banks pursuing unconventional policies, and the measurement of valuation-relevant inflation.


Discussant: Christopher Sims (Princeton University) | Presentation

Christopher Sims is the John F. Sherrerd 52 University Professor of Economics at Princeton University, where he has been on the faculty since 1999. He received his PhD from Harvard University in 1968 and was on the economics faculty at Harvard (1968-70), the University of Minnesota (1970-1990) and Yale (1990-1999). He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and has served as a visiting scholar at several US Federal Reserve Banks and at the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve. Along with Thomas J. Sargent he won the 2011 Economics Nobel Prize. His research has dealt with econometric time series methods, with estimation of monetary policy behavior and of the effects of monetary policy on the economy, and with the theory of price level determination. He is known for promoting the usefulness of loosely structured models (VAR's and SVAR's), for advocating a Bayesian perspective on econometric inference, for emphasizing the importance of fiscal policy in determining the path of inflation, and for suggesting the application of information theory to economics.

Monetary Policy, Incomplete Information, and the Zero Lower Bound
Paper | Presentation
Christopher Gust (Federal Reserve Board), Benjamin K. Johannsen (Federal Reserve Board) and David López-Salido (Federal Reserve Board)

David López-Salido is deputy associate director of the Program Direction of the Division of Monetary Affairs of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. His research relates to an array of topics in monetary economics and applied macroeconomics and recently it has focused on the consequences of nonlinearities in business cycle models. Of particular interest are the implications of the zero lower bound of nominal interest for measuring the effects of monetary policy, for conducing monetary policy, as well as its implications for the business cycle. His recent work also spans on understanding individual price adjustment responses to aggregate shocks, the macro-financial linkages, and the financial stability considerations of the monetary policy design.
His research has been published, among other journals, in The Review of Economic Studies, Journal of Monetary Economics, American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, and Review of Economics and Statistics. He is also a Research Fellow of the Monetary and Economic Fluctuations Programme of the CEPR, Centre for Economic Policy Research, London.


Discussant: Andrew Levin (Dartmouth College) | Presentation

Andrew Levin is a professor of economics at Dartmouth College. Dr. Levin received his Ph.D. in economics from Stanford University in 1989. He worked as an economist at the Federal Reserve Board for two decades, including two years as a special adviser to Chairman Ben Bernanke and Vice Chair Janet Yellen on monetary policy strategy and communications (2010-2012). Dr. Levin subsequently served as an adviser in the research department at the International Monetary Fund, and he joined the Dartmouth faculty in July 2015. Dr. Levin has had extensive interactions with many other central banks across the globe: He served as a consultant to the European Central Bank’s inflation persistence network and to the Bank of Canada’s external review of research, he was a co-editor of the International Journal of Central Banking, he has been a visiting scholar at the Bank of Japan and the Dutch National Bank, and he has provided technical assistance to the national banks of Albania and Macedonia, and most recently, the Bank of Ghana. His research has been published in leading economic journals, including the American Economic Review, the Journal of the European Economic Association, the Journal of Monetary Economics, and the Journal of Econometrics.

4:00-4:15pm

*** Coffee Break ***

4:15-5:45pm

Economic Forum: Policy Lessons and the Future of Unconventional Monetary Policy

Watch the Video

Moderator:
Maurice Obstfeld, Economic Counsellor and Director, Research Department, IMF

Maurice Obstfeld was born in New York City in 1952. Since September 2015, he has been the Economic Counsellor and Director of Research at the International Monetary Fund, on leave from the University of California, Berkeley. At Berkeley, he is the Class of 1958 Professor of Economics and formerly Chair of the Department of Economics (1998-2001). He arrived at Berkeley in 1991 as a professor, following permanent appointments at Columbia (1979-1986) and the University of Pennsylvania (1986-1989), and a visiting appointment at Harvard (1989-90). He received his Ph.D. in economics from MIT in 1979 after attending the University of Pennsylvania (B.A., 1973) and King’s College, Cambridge University (M.A., 1975). From July 2014 to August 2015, Dr. Obstfeld served as a Member of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers. He was previously (2002-2014) an honorary advisor to the Bank of Japan's Institute of Monetary and Economic Studies. He is a Fellow of the Econometric Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Among Dr. Obstfeld's honors are Tilburg University’s Tjalling Koopmans Asset Award, the John von Neumann Award of the Rajk Laszlo College of Advanced Studies (Budapest), and the Kiel Institute’s Bernhard Harms Prize. He has given a number distinguished lectures, including the American Economic Association’s annual Richard T. Ely Lecture, the L. K. Jha Memorial Lecture of the Reserve Bank of India, and the Frank Graham Memorial Lecture at Princeton. Dr. Obstfeld has served both on the Executive Committee and as Vice President of the American Economic Association. He has consulted and taught at the IMF and numerous central banks around the world. He is also the co-author of two leading textbooks on international economics, International Economics (10th edition, 2014, with Paul Krugman and Marc Melitz) and Foundations of International Macroeconomics (1996, with Kenneth Rogoff), as well as more than 100 research articles on exchange rates, international financial crises, global capital markets, and monetary policy.

Panelists:
Claudio Borio (BIS) | Presentation

Claudio Borio is Head of the Monetary and Economic Department (MED), Bank for International Settlements. He has been at the BIS since 1987, covering various responsibilities in the Monetary and Economic Department including Director of Research and Statistics and Head of the Secretariat of the Committee on the Global Financial System and the Gold and Foreign Exchange Committee, which examine, inter alia, issues related to financial stability and market functioning. From 1985-1987, he worked as economist at the OECD in the country studies branch of the Economics and Statistics Department. Prior to that, he was Lecturer and Research Fellow at Brasenose College, Oxford University. He holds a DPhil and MPhil in Economics and a BA in Politics, Philosophy and Economics from the same university. Author of numerous publications in the fields of monetary policy, banking, finance and issues related to financial stability.


Lael Brainard (Federal Reserve Board)

Lael Brainard currently serves as Governor at the Federal Reserve Board. Brainard previously served as Under Secretary for International Affairs at the Department of Treasury, where she was awarded the Alexander Hamilton Award for her work addressing financial stability in the Euro Area crisis, with the G-20 and Financial Stability Board (FSB) on global financial reform, and through the Strategic and Economic Dialogue with China on rebalancing and reform. Brainard previously served as Deputy Director of the White House National Economic Council and as G-8 Sherpa, where she helped coordinate the U.S. responses to the Asian Financial Crisis and the Mexican Financial Crisis and led efforts on development and trade. Brainard served as Vice President of the Brookings Institution, where she built a new research program to address key global economic challenges. Brainard was Associate Professor of Applied Economics at MIT Sloan School, where her research contributed to the debate on the relationship between offshore production, trade, and jobs and the measurement of structural unemployment. Brainard received her doctorate from Harvard University, where she was a National Science Foundation Fellow. Brainard started her career in the private sector at McKinsey.


Paul Krugman (CUNY)

(Photo: Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times)
Paul Krugman is Distinguished Scholar at the Luxembourg Income Study Center, and Distinguished Professor in the Economics Program of The Graduate Center, City University of New York. In addition, he is Professor Emeritus of Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School. He is best-known to the general public as Op-Ed columnist for The New York Times, a position he’s held since 2000.
In 2008, Krugman was the sole recipient of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his work on international trade theory. In 2011, Time magazine ranked his New York Times blog, "The Conscience of a Liberal," as number one in their listing of “The 25 Best Financial Blogs.” He has approximately 1.42 million Twitter followers.
In addition to the Nobel, Krugman is the recipient of John Bates Clark Medal from the American Economic Association, an award given every two years to a top economist under the age of 40. He also received the Asturias Award given by the King of Spain, considered to be the European Pulitzer Prize.
Author or editor of more than 25 books and over 200 published professional articles, Krugman has written extensively for non-economists as well. Before joining the staff of The New York Times, his work appeared in Fortune, Slate, Foreign Policy, The New Republic and Newsweek.
Krugman's approach to economics is reaching a new generation of college students. He and Robin Wells have coauthored college textbooks on Micro and Macroeconomics that rank in the top-selling economics textbooks used in American colleges today.
Krugman has served on the faculties of MIT, Yale and Stanford. He is a Fellow of the Econometric Society and a member of the Group of Thirty. He has served as a consultant to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the United Nations, as well as to foreign countries including Portugal and the Philippines. In his twenties, he served as senior international economist for the President's Council of Economic Advisers under Ronald Reagan.
He is a regular contributor to ABC-TV's "This Week" with George Stephanopoulos and makes frequent appearances on Charlie Rose, PBS NewsHour, Bloomberg Television, NPR and MSNBC.
Krugman's four recent trade books, End This Depression Now!, The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008, The Conscience of a Liberal and The Great Unraveling became New York Times bestsellers.


Adam Posen (Peterson Institute)

Adam Posen is President of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, the world's leading independent think tank on economics and globalization. He is one of the world's foremost experts on macroeconomic policy, resolution of financial crises, the economies of Europe, Japan, and the US, and central banking issues.
The Winter 2013 issue of The International Economy (TIE) magazine features an in-depth interview with Peterson Institute President Adam S. Posen. From September 2009, by appointment of the UK Chancellor of the Exchequer, Dr. Posen served for three years as an external member of the Bank of England's rate-setting Monetary Policy Committee. During this critical period for the world economy, he was a prominent advocate of activist policy response to the financial crisis, successfully led the MPC into quantitative easing, brought innovative efforts to stimulate business investment to the top of the UK economic agenda, and accurately forecast global inflation developments.
Adam Posen brings a uniquely international perspective to macroeconomics: He worked in finance in Germany following reunification; wrote the definitive book on Japan's economic crisis of the 1990s and counseled the Koizumi government that subsequently turned Japan around; coauthored with Ben Bernanke a reform program for Fed policy, and currently advises the US Congressional Budget Office; and consulted for the UK Cabinet Office on the successful London G-20 summit of 2009, prior to being appointed to the MPC.
Among the most cited economists in the press, he appears frequently on Bloomberg, CNBC, BBC, and NPR programs, and his commentary is published regularly in the world's leading newspapers. In April 2012, an article in the Atlantic magazine named Dr. Posen to its international team of "superstar central bankers," and in December 2012 he was profiled in the New York Times Magazine article "God Save the British Economy."
Dr. Posen received his PhD and BA from Harvard University and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, of the Trilateral Commission, and of the faculty of the World Economic Forum. The author or editor of five books, he has been the recipient of major grants and research fellowships from the American Academy in Berlin, the Bank of England, the Brookings Institution, the European Commission, the Ford Foundation, the Sloan Foundation, and the US National Science Foundation.

Conference Organizing Committee: Gustavo Adler (IMF, Conference Chair), Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas (Editor-in-Chief of the IMF Economic Review, University of California at Berkeley), Ruy Lama (IMF), Tommaso Mancini Griffoli (IMF), Jean-Marc Natal (IMF), Carolina Osorio Buitron (IMF), and Pau Rabanal (IMF, Associate Editor of the IMF Economic Review).

Conference Coordinator: Tracey Lookadoo

Disclaimer

The website contains papers and web links to papers that will be presented at the Sixteenth Jacques Polak Annual Research Conference (ARC). The views expressed in these papers are those of the authors only, and the presence of them, or of links to them, on the IMF website does not imply that the IMF, its Executive Board, or its management endorses or shares the views expressed in the papers.