1993 Nobel Laureate in Economics

Director, Center for Population Economics,

The Graduate School of Business, University of Chicago

Co-Director, Program on Cohort Studies, National Bureau of Economics Research

Robert William Fogel received his B.A. from Cornell University, his M.A. from Columbia University, and his Ph.D., in Economics, from Johns Hopkins University. He has held faculty positions at the University of Rochester, Cambridge University, and Harvard University. He is currently the Charles R. Walgreen Distinguished Service Professor of American Institutions in the Graduate School of Business, director of the Center for Population Economics, and a member of the Department of Economics and of the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. He is also co-director of the Program on Cohort Studies at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He received the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1993 (with Douglass C. North). During his graduate work under Simon Kuznets, he became interested in combining the study of economics and history to understand long-term technological and institutional change. Early work focused on railroads and economic growth in American history, which was followed by analyses of the economics of American slavery (jointly with S. L. Engerman) published as Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery (1974) and Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery (4 vols., 1989-1992).

 

The CUNY Distinguished Professor of Economics

Director of Health Economics, National Bureau of Economics Research (NBER)

Michael Grossman is a "child" of the NBER. He has been affiliated with the Bureau since 1966 when Victor Fuchs hired him as a research assistant. Currently, he directs the NBER's Health Economics Program and is Distinguished Professor of Economics at the City University of New York Graduate Center, where he has taught since 1972. He also is an associate editor of the Journal of Health Economics and the Review of Economics of the Household and a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences. He received his Ph.D. in economics from Columbia University in 1970. Grossman is a pioneer in health economics, especially for his seminal work on health determinants, leading to a widely-adopted analytical framework, known as the Grossman Model, for studying health demand and production functions. His other research includes the economics of substance use and abuse; and the determinants of interest rates on tax-exempt hospital bonds. His recently completed studies deal with the effects of excise taxes on cigarette smoking by pregnant women, the relationship between substance use and risky sexual behavior by teenagers, the economics of obesity, and the effects of managed care on hospital prices for bypass surgery and for angioplasty. Grossman lives in Manhattan with his wife, Ilene. They have two grown daughters, Sandy and Barri. His hobbies include tennis, skiing (despite an infamous wipe-out on a double black diamond), piloting his boat, the "NBER South," docked in Ophelia on the Northern Neck of Virginia, playing with his fraternal twin grandsons, Zack and Ben, and supervising Ph.D. dissertations (86 and counting).

 

Edward Everett Hale Centennial Professor of Economics

University of Texas at Austin

Daniel S. Hamermesh is Edward Everett Hale Centennial Professor of Economics at the University of Texas at Austin. His A.B. is from the University of Chicago (1965), his Ph.D. from Yale (1969). He taught from 1969-73 at Princeton, from 1973-93 at Michigan State. He has held visiting professorships at universities in North America, Europe, Australia and Asia, and lectured at universities in 43 states and 20 foreign countries. His research has concentrated on labor demand, time use, social programs, and unusual applications of labor economics (to suicide, sleep and beauty). Hamermesh is a Fellow of the Econometric Society and the Society of Labor Economists, a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, Program Director at the Forschungsinstitut zur Zukunft der Arbeit (IZA), and Past President of the Society of Labor Economists and of the Midwest Economics Association. His magnum opus, Labor Demand, was published by Princeton University Press in 1993, and his labor economics textbook, The Economics of Work and Pay, has been through various editions since 1984. In 2005 McGraw-Hill Irwin published the second edition of his Economics Is Everywhere, a series of 400 vignettes designed to illustrate the ubiquity of economics in everyday life and how the simple tools in a microeconomics principles class can be used. Hamermesh has been married for 38 years to Frances W. Hamermesh, a partner in an Austin law firm, and they have two sons. His hobbies include long-distance running, at which his skills are rapidly deteriorating; foreign travel, in which increasing practice has heightened his enjoyment, and playing with his five grandchildren, whom he does not see often enough.

 

The K.T Li Professor of Economics

Harvard University School of Public Health

William Hsiao is the K.T. Li Professor of Economics at the Harvard School of Public Health. He received his Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard University and he is also a fully qualified actuary with extensive experience in insurance. Currently, Hsiao directs the Program in Health Financing at Harvard. He is a leading authority on health system economics. Among other significant research roles, he led a research team that developed a rational fee schedule for payment of physician services, the resource-based relative value scale (RBRVS.) that has been adopted by the United States, Australia, Canada and France. Hsiao has advised more than twenty nations on their health sector reforms and the design of social insurance programs, including the United States, Sweden, Cyprus, Poland, Colombia, China, Hong Kong (SAR), Taiwan, South Africa, Philippines, India, Sri Lanka and Uganda. He also served as advisor to the World Bank on the development of economic security and health programs in the Third World, the International Monetary Fund, and World Health Organization. Hsiao served as a policy advisor to three US presidents on the planning of national health insurance, social security and pension reforms. The United States Congress also engaged him as a consultant on Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid programs. New York State appointed him to chair the Hospital Rate Setting Commission for the state. Prior to his appointment at Harvard, Dr. Hsiao was the deputy chief actuary of the US government. Hsiao is an elected member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences-Institute of Medicine. He also served on the boards of the National Academy of Social Insurance, the Society of Actuaries, the National Pension Board of the Methodist Church, and the governing boards of several hospitals.

 

Deputy Mayor of ChongQing Municipal Government

 

Professor of Economics

Director of China Center for Economics Research

Peking University

Justin Yifu Lin is Professor and Founding Director of the China Centre for Economic Research (CCER) at Peking University. He received his PhD in economics from the University of Chicago in 1986 and is the author of thirteen books, including the China Miracle: Development Strategy and Economic Reform, which has been published in seven languages, and the State-owned Enterprise Reform, which is available in Chinese, Japanese, and English. He has published more than 100 articles in refereed international journals and collected volumes on history, development, and transition. Among many of his public roles in China, Justin Yifu Lin is an advisor to the State Leading Group of IT Development, a senior advisor to the Drafting Committee of China?s Tenth Five-year Plan, an advisor to the mayors of Beijing, Shanghai and Tianjin. He also serves on several international committees, leading groups, and councils on development policy, technology, and environment. He was awarded the 1993 and 2001 Sun Yefang Prize (the highest honour for economist in China), the 1993 Policy Article Prize of Centre for International Food and Agricultural Policy at University of Minnesota, the 1997 Sir John Crawford Award of the Australian Agricultural and Resource Economics Society, the 1999 Best Article Prize of the Australian Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics, the Citation Classic Award in 2000 (by the publisher of Social Science Citation Index), and various other prizes. He is a member of the National Committee, Chinese People?s Political Consultative Conference, Vice Chairman of Committee for Economic Affairs of CPPCC, and Vice Chairman of All-China Federation of Industry & Commerce.

 

Quetelet Professor of Sustainable Development

Director of the Earth Institute

Columbia University

Jeffery Sachs is the Director of The Earth Institute, Quetelet Professor of Sustainable Development, and Professor of Health Policy and Management at Columbia University. He is also Director of the UN Millennium Project and Special Advisor to United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan on the Millennium Development Goals, the internationally agreed goals to reduce extreme poverty, disease, and hunger by the year 2015. Sachs is internationally renowned for his work as economic advisor to governments in Latin America, Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, Asia and Africa, and his work with international agencies on problems of poverty reduction, debt cancellation for the poorest countries, and disease control. He is a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. Sachs has been an advisor to the IMF, the World Bank, the OECD, the World Health Organization, and the United Nations Development Program, among other international agencies. During 2000-2001, he was Chairman of the Commission on Macroeconomics and Health of the World Health Organization, and from September 1999 through March 2000 he served as a member of the International Financial Institutions Advisory Commission established by the U.S. Congress. Sachs' research interests include the links of health and development, economic geography, globalization, transition to market economies in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, international financial markets, international macroeconomic policy coordination, emerging markets, economic development and growth, global competitiveness, and macroeconomic policies in developing and developed countries. He is a member of the Brookings Panel of Economists, the Board of Advisors of the Chinese Economists Society, among other organizations. He received his B.A., summa cum laude, from Harvard College in 1976, and his M.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1978 and 1980 respectively. He joined the Harvard faculty as an Assistant Professor in 1980, and was promoted to Associate Professor in 1982 and Full Professor in 1983.

 

Professor of Economics

Executive Dean, Guanghua School of Management

Peking University

Weiying Zhang is Professor of Economics, the Executive Dean of Guanghua School of Management of Peking University, and Director of the Institute of Business Research of Peking University. He received his D.Phil in economics in 1994 from Oxford University under the supervisions of Professors James Mirrlees (1996 Nobel Laureate) and Donald Hay. Between 1984 and 1990, he was a research fellow of the Economic System Reform Institute of China under the State Commission of Restructuring Economic System. During this period, he was heavily involved in engineering China's economic reforms, and pioneered the well-known "dual-track price system reform" (in 1984). He co-founded the China Center for Economic Research, Peking University in 1994 and worked there until 1997 when he began to serve his current appointment at the PKU Guanghua School of Management. He was the major designer of Peking University's faculty system reform in 2003.Zhang's research interests include the industrial organization, corporate governance, and information economics. He is a widely recognized authority on the theory of the firm and ownership reform in China. He is best known for his theory of "capital-hiring-labor" and management selection; and for his contributions to macro-control policy debating, ownership reform debating, and entrepreneurship studies. He has been the most cited economist in Chinese academic journals since 1995. His works have generated significant impacts on the ongoing enterprise reform policy formulation and the development of economics in China. In addition to conducting research, Zhang also provides extensive advisory services to government agencies, business sectors, and international organizations. He once served on the Advisory Board of Enterprise Reform to the State Commission for Restructuring Economic system; Department of Enterprises of the State Economic and Trade Commission, and the World Bank Project on the Chinese State-owned Enterprises Reform. Currently he is a member of the Advisory Board of State Information as well as a member of the Advisory Board for State Council's Deregulation Group. He has been the Chief Economist of China Entrepreneur Forum since 2001.