Big-Data Initiative in International Macro-Finance
Faculty Organizers
Matteo Maggiori
The Moghadam Family Professor of Finance, Stanford Graduate School of Business
Matteo’s research focuses on international macroeconomics and finance. His research topics have included the analysis of exchange rate dynamics, global capital flows, the international financial system, reserve currencies, tax havens, bubbles, expectations and portfolio investment, and very long-run discount rates. He is a research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research and a research affiliate at the Center for Economic Policy Research. Among a number of honors, he received the 2021 Fischer Black Prize for an outstanding financial economist under age 40, the Guggenheim and Carnegie Fellowships, a National Science Foundation CAREER grant, and the Carlo Alberto Medal for an outstanding Italian economist under age 40. He received his PhD from the University of California at Berkeley.
Jesse M. Schreger
Associate Professor of Business, Columbia Business School
Jesse’s research is primarily on international finance and macroeconomics, focusing on sovereign debt and exchange rates. He is a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research, a Research Fellow at the Center for Economic Policy Research, and a Sloan Research Fellow. Prior to joining Columbia, he was an assistant professor at Harvard Business School and a post-doctoral fellow in the Department of Economics at Princeton University. He received his PhD in Political Economy and Government from Harvard University. His undergraduate degree in economics and international relations is from the University of Pennsylvania.
Participating Faculty
Susan Athey
The Economics of Technology Professor, Stanford Graduate School of Business
Susan’s research is in the areas of industrial organization, microeconomic theory, and applied econometrics. Her current research focuses on the design of auction-based marketplaces and the economics of the internet, primarily on online advertising and the economics of the news media. She has also studied dynamic mechanisms and games with incomplete information, comparative statics under uncertainty, and econometric methods for analyzing auction models.
David Baqaee
Associate Professor, UCLA
David Baqaee is an Associate Professor, having received his Ph.D. from Harvard and worked previously at the London School of Economics. He works on aggregation in disaggregated macroeconomic models, with an emphasis on the role production networks play in business cycles, growth, and international trade.
Nicholas Bloom
Professor of Economics, Stanford University
Nick's research interests focus on measuring and explaining management practices across firms and countries. He has been collecting data from thousands of manufacturing firms, retailers, schools and hospitals across countries, to develop a quantitative basis for management research. Recently he has also been running management field experiments in India to identify clearly causal links between management and performance. A second area of research is on the causes and consequences of uncertainty, arising from events such as the credit crunch, the 9/11 terrorist attack and the Cuban Missile crisis. He also works on innovation and IT, examining factors that effect this such as tax, trade and regulation.
Alberto Cavallo
Thomas S. Murphy Professor of Business Administration, Harvard Business School
Alberto teaches in the Business, Government, and the International Economy unit at Harvard University. He is a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research and a member of the Technical Advisory Committee of the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. Professor Cavallo's research focuses on the behavior of prices and its implications for macroeconomic measurement and policies. His work is based on the use of daily data collected from hundreds of online retailers around the world. He co-founded The Billion Prices Project, an academic initiative at Harvard and MIT that pioneered the use of online data to conduct research on high-frequency price dynamics and inflation measurement. He also created Inflacion Verdadera to measure the real inflation rate in Argentina and Venezuela and co-founded two private companies: DineroMail and PriceStats. He received a PhD from Harvard University in 2010, an MBA from MIT Sloan in 2005, and a BS from Universidad de San Andres in Argentina in 2000.
Christopher Clayton
Assistant Professor of Finance, Yale School of Management
Christopher Clayton does research in international finance and macroeconomics, finance, and macroeconomics. His research topics include geopolitics and economics, reserve currency internationalization, multinational banking, financial regulation, and monetary policy. He received a PhD in Economics from Harvard University in 2020.
Wenxin Du
Professor of Finance, Columbia Business School
Wenxin Du is a Professor of Finance and the Henry Kaufman Professor of Financial Institutions at the Columbia Business School. She studies global currency and fixed income markets, central banking, financial regulations, and emerging market finance. She was the recipient of 2022 Award for Economics in Central Banking, and was named the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Research Fellow 2021-2023, In addition, she has won several top academic awards for her research, including the Amundi Pioneer First Prize and AQR Insight Award Top Prize for her work on deviations from covered interest rate parity. Prior to joining Columbia, Du was a professor of finance at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. She earned an A.M. and a Ph.D. both in Economics from Harvard University, and a B.A. in Economics and Mathematics from Swarthmore College with Highest Honors.
Tarek Hassan
Professor of Economics, Boston University
Professor Hassan’s research focuses on international finance, macro-finance, and social factors in economic growth. Some of his recent papers study the effects of uncertainty on firm behavior and on the allocation of capital across countries. Another set of papers studies the effect of social structure on economic growth and the effect of historical migration and ethnic diversity on foreign direct investment. Hassan’s work has appeared in the American Economic Review, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, and the Journal of Finance. He is a research fellow of the National Bureau of Economic Research and the Center for Economic Policy Research.
Charles Jones
The STANCO 25 Professor of Economics, Stanford Graduate School of Business
Charles I. (Chad) Jones is an economist noted for his research on long-run economic growth. In particular, he has examined theoretically and empirically the fundamental sources of growth in incomes over time and the reasons underlying the enormous differences in standards of living across countries. In recent years, he has used his expertise in macroeconomic methods to study the economic causes behind the rise in health spending and top income inequality.
Şebnem Kalemli-Özcan
Neil Moskowitz Professor of Economics and Finance, University of Maryland
Şebnem is Neil Moskowitz Endowed Professor of Economics at the University of Maryland, College Park. She is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and a research fellow at the Center for Economic Policy Research. Her research fields are international macro and finance and economic growth. She pioneered data collection from small private non listed firms from many countries such that these firms real outcomes can be connected to their financing. Her recent work focuses on international transmission of U.S. monetary policy through risk premia in borrowing costs of firms in emerging economies. She also works on SME financing in U.S. and in European countries and how firms leverage can lead to misallocation of resources, declines in aggregate productivity during normal times, and declines in aggregate investment leading to sluggish recoveries after financial crises. Currently, she is the co-editor of the Journal of International Economics and serves at the editorial board of American Economic Review, Journal of European Economic Association, and Journal of Development Economics. Professor Kalemli-Özcan has published extensively in journals such as American Economic Review, Quarterly Journal of Economics, Journal of Finance, Journal of European Economic Association, and Review of Economics and Statistics.
Pete Klenow
Landau Professor in Economic Policy, Stanford University
Pete specializes in macroeconomics, with emphasis on empirical studies of prices, productivity, and economic growth. He received his PhD in economics from Stanford University, where he is currently the Ralph Landau Professor of Economics and the Gordon and Betty Moore Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research and the Dong Wei Fellow at the King Center for Global Development. He is co-director of the National Bureau of Economic Research program on Economic Growth and Fluctuations. He is a regular visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Banks of Minneapolis and San Francisco, and a Special Sworn Status researcher at the U.S. Census Bureau. He is currently co-editor of the American Economic Review: Insights, and was previously an associate editor for the Journal of Political Economy, Econometrica, the Quarterly Journal of Economics and the American Economic Review. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a fellow of the Econometric Society.
Arvind Krishnamurthy
The John S. Osterweis Professor of Finance, Stanford Graduate School of Business
Arvind Krishnamurthy's research is in the areas of finance and macroeconomics. He has published research on financial intermediation, debt markets, housing markets, financial crises, monetary policy, and financial regulation. He has studied the causes and consequences of liquidity crises in emerging markets and developed economies, and the role of government policy in stabilizing crises. Recently he has been examining the importance of U.S. Treasury bonds and the dollar in the international monetary system.
Hanno Lustig
The Mizuho Financial Group Professor of Finance, Stanford Graduate School of Business
Hanno has worked at the intersection of macroeconomics and finance. Recently, his research has focused on understanding the forces that determine exchange rates in currency markets. His research has shown how currencies have different risk characteristics that are determined by a country's role in the global economy. These risk characteristics help to understand the behavior of exchange rates. In addition, Lustig has explored the impact of government guarantees on the pricing of tail risk borne by large financial institutions. More recently, Lustig has also worked on understanding the determinants of a firm's volatility (volatility of sales, cash flows, stock returns etc).
Emi Nakamura
Chancellor's Professor of Economics, UC Berkeley
Emi Nakamura is the Chancellor's Professor of Economics in the Berkeley Economics department. Her research focuses on monetary and fiscal policy, business cycles and macroeconomic measurement. She is a co-editor of the American Economic Review, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and co-director of the Monetary Economics program at the National Bureau of Economic Research. She serves on the Congressional Budget Office’s Panel of Economic Advisers and the Executive Committee of the American Economics Association. She is a recipient of the John Bates Clark medal, the Elaine Bennett Research Prize, the NSF Career Grant, and the Sloan Research Fellowship. She holds a PhD from Harvard University and an A.B. from Princeton University, and taught at the Columbia economics department and business school before joining the Berkeley economics department in 2018.
Brent Neiman
Edward Eagle Brown Professor of Economics, Chicago Booth School of Business
Brent conducts research on international macroeconomics and trade. He serves as the director of the Initiative on International Economics at the Becker Friedman Institute, an executive board member of the Initiative for Global Markets at Chicago Booth, a research associate in the International Finance and Macroeconomics and the International Trade and Investment groups at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and an associate editor of The American Economic Review, The Quarterly Journal of Economics, and The Journal of International Economics. He previously served as the staff economist for international finance on the White House Council of Economic Advisers and has worked at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, at McKinsey and Company, and at the McKinsey Global Institute.
Adrien Verdelhan
Stephens Naphtal Professor of Finance, MIT Sloan School of Management
Adrien’s research focuses on measures of systematic risk in financial markets, particularly in currency and sovereign bond markets. Verdelhan’s work in international finance shows when and why exchange rates are risky, thus shedding light on the most well-known and puzzling currency trading strategy: the carry trade. His recent work focuses on arbitrage opportunities and the role of banking regulation. His research has been published notably in the American Economic Review, The Journal of Finance, and The Review of Financial Studies. He is currently a Research Fellow of the National Bureau of Economic Research. He was elected Teacher of the Year in 2011 and in 2018 by MIT Sloan students and received the Jamieson Prize for Excellence in Teaching in 2016.
Chenzi Xu
Assistant Professor of Finance, Stanford Graduate School of Business
Chenzi received her PhD in Economics from Harvard in 2019, and prior to joining Stanford GSB was the International Economics Fellow at Dartmouth College. She works on topics at the intersection of international economics, finance, and history. Her research includes the impact of financial crises and financial growth on international trade, the causes of sovereign debt default, and safe assets.
Gabriel Zucman
Professor of Economics, Paris School of Economics
Gabriel Zucman is professor of economics at the Paris School of Economics and Ecole normale supérieure – PSL, associate professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley, and founding director of the EU Tax Observatory. He is the author of articles published in journals such as the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the American Economic Review, the Review of Economic Studies, and of two books. His research focuses on the accumulation, distribution, and taxation of global wealth.