| 1 | Name: | Dr. Ben Bernanke | |
| Institution: | Brookings Institution | ||
| Year Elected: | 2006 | ||
| Class: | 3. Social Sciences | ||
| Subdivision: | 302. Economics | ||
| Residency: | Resident | ||
| Living? : | Living | ||
| Birth Date: | 1953 | ||
Ben S. Bernanke is a Distinguished Fellow in Residence with the Economic Studies Program at the Brookings Institution. He served two terms as chairman of the Federal Reserve, the central bank of the United States from 2006 to 2014. He is a leading economist who has carried out important research on macroeconomic and monetary history and policy. In a 1983 article in the American Economic Review he noted and analyzed the non-monetary effects of the financial crisis in the Great Depression, and in a 1991 article in the Journal of Political Economy he critically examined competing theories of the business cycle and the phenomenon of pro-cyclical movements in labor productivity. He returned to the analysis of the Great Depression in 1995, and in an influential 2001 article in the American Economic Review he tackled the question of whether central banks should respond to asset prices (i.e., financial bubbles). His analysis of deflation and its consequences in the Japanese economy was very influential in recent policy-making. Ben Bernanke was nominated to succeed Alan Greenspan as the fourteenth chairman of the Federal Reserve in 2005, and he was easily confirmed in 2006. He was confirmed for a second term in January 2010. He served on the Federal Reserve Board of Governors from 2002-05 and also held the chairmanship of the White House Council of Economic Advisors. A graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Ph.D., 1979), he has served on the faculties of Stanford (1979-85) and Princeton (1985-2005) Universities, chairing the latter's economics department from 1996-2005. He was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2001 and a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2006. | |||