Katharine G. Abraham, University of Maryland (chair)

Katharine G. Abraham is Professor of Survey Methodology at the University of Maryland. She is a labor economist whose research has included studies of employers’ compensation policies, use of nonstandard employment arrangements, and adjustment to changes in labor demand. She also has a long-standing interest in the measurement of economic activity.  From 1993 through 2001, Abraham served as Commissioner for the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. She is a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research; co-editor of the journal Labour Economics; and a member of the Committee on National Statistics, National Academy of Sciences.  Iowa State University awarded her an honorary doctorate in 2002, and she was the 2002 recipient of the Julius Shiskin Award for Economic Statistics.  She was elected a Fellow of the American Statistical Association in 2003 and a Fellow of the Society of Labor Economists in 2007.  Abraham received a B.S. in Economics from Iowa State University in 1976 and a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University in 1982.

Robert Feenstra, University of California, Davis

Robert C. Feenstra is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of California, Davis. He also directs the International Trade and Investment program at the National Bureau of Economic Research, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He is a former editor of the Journal of International Economics and serves on several other editorial boards. Feenstra has published over 80 articles in international trade and 11 books, and has been supported by grants from the National Science Foundation. He specializes in both U.S. and global trade patterns, and has lectured in Europe, China and throughout Asia. Recently, he completed the graduate textbook Advanced International Trade: Theory and Evidence (Princeton University Press, 2004), and an undergraduate textbook jointly with Alan M. Taylor, International Economics (Worth Publishers, 2008). In September 2006 he received the Bernhard-Harms Prize from the Kiel Institute of World Economics, in Germany.

Dennis Fixler, Bureau of Economic Analysis

Dennis Fixler is Chief Statistician of the Bureau of Economic Analysis. He is primarily responsible for the source data and methodology used in BEA estimates and the coordination of cross-program research. Prior to joining BEA in June 2001, Fixler was at the Bureau of Labor Statistics; most recently serving as Chief of the Division of Price and Index Number Research. Previous positions were at the Federal Trade Commission and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He has written articles on index number theory and construction, with particular attention to the development and implementation of output and price indexes for services industries, the reliability of BEA estimates, and general national income account measurement issues. He received his BA degree in Economics from Boston University and his M.S. and Ph.D. in economics from Purdue University.

Barbara Fraumeni, University of Southern Maine

David S. Johnson, Census Bureau

David S. Johnson is the Chief of the Housing and Household Economic Statistics Division at the U.S. Census Bureau. The division compiles and analyzes data on the socioeconomic characteristics of households, families and individuals, including the homeownership rates, income, poverty and health insurance statistics, and the current effort to reengineer the Survey of Income and Program Participation. Before joining the Census Bureau, he served as the Assistant Commissioner for Consumer Prices and Price Indexes at the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). He began his federal career at BLS, where he started in 1990 as a research economist in the Division of Price and Index Number Research, and eventually became Chief of the Division. He has written several journal articles on such topics as the measure of consumption inequality and mobility, the effects of tax rebates, equivalence scale estimation, poverty measurement, specification testing, and the well-being of children. He has published articles in the American Economic Review, Review of Economics and Statistics, Review of Income and Wealth, and Monthly Labor Review. He has a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Minnesota, and he received his B.S. in mathematics and economics from the University of Puget Sound. He has been an adjunct faculty for the Georgetown Public Policy Program.

Jonathan A. Parker, Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University

Jonathan A. Parker is Professor of Finance at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, and a National Bureau of Economic Research Faculty Research Fellow. Dr. Parker received his Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he was awarded the Robert Solow Endowment Prize for excellence in research and teaching. Prior to his present position at Northwestern, Dr. Parker has held faculty positions at the Princeton University department of economics, where he was affiliated with the Bendheim Center for Finance and the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, at the department of economics at the University of Wisconsin, where he was the Maude P. and Milton J. Shoemaker Fellow, and at the University of Michigan Business School, where he was a Society of Scholars Fellow. Professor Parker currently serves on the Academic Advisory Panel of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, on the Board of Editors of the American Journal of Macroeconomics, and as Associate Editor for the Journal of Money Credit and Banking. He is a member of the American Economic Association and Econometric Society.

Professor Parker teaches both macroeconomics and finance, and his research focuses on macroeconomic risk and stock returns, taxation and consumer spending, national saving and wealth, income risk and consumer demand, and psychology and economics.

Charles Schultze, Brookings Institution

Charles L. Schultze is Senior Fellow Emeritus at Brookings. He is a macro-economist whose research includes studies of the determinants of inflation and public expenditure policy. From 1962-67 he was assistant Director and then Director of the U.S. Bureau of the Budget, and from 1977-1980 Chairman of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers. In 1984 he served as President of the American Economic Association. Most recently he chaired the Panel on Conceptualizing and Measuring Cost-of–Living and Price Indexes for the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences. Schultze received B.A. and M.A. degrees from Georgetown University in 1948 and 1950 and a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Maryland in 1960.

Matthew Shapiro, University of Michigan

Matthew D. Shapiro is the Lawrence R. Klein Collegiate Professor of Economics and Research Professor (Survey Research Center) at the University of Michigan. He is also a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. Shapiro received B.A. and M.A. degrees from Yale in 1979 and a Ph.D. from M.I.T. in 1984.

Shapiro's general area of research is macroeconomics. He has carried out research on investment and capital utilization, business-cycle fluctuations, consumption and saving, financial markets, fiscal policy, monetary policy, time-series econometrics, and survey methodology. Among his current research interests are modeling how recent changes in tax policy affect investment, employment, and output; modeling saving, retirement, and portfolio choices of households; improving the quality of national economic statistics; and using surveys to address questions in macroeconomics.

During 1993-1994, Shapiro served as Senior Economist at the Council of Economic Advisers with responsibilities for macroeconomic analysis and the weekly economic briefing of the President. He was also a Junior Staff Economist at the Council during 1979-1980. Prior to joining the faculty of the University of Michigan in 1989, Shapiro was an Assistant Professor of Economics at Yale and a member of the Cowles Foundation for Research in Economics. Shapiro was co-editor of the American Economic Review from 1997 to 2000. He was Chair of the Department of Economics, University of Michigan, from 2003 to 2007.

Shapiro is currently chair of the Federal Economic Statistics Advisory Committee--the advisory committee of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Bureau of Economic Analysis, and the economic programs of the Census Bureau. He is also a member of the Academic Advisory Panel of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. Shapiro has been a member National Academy of Science's Committee on National Statistics and its Panel on Non-Market Accounts.

Jack Triplett, Brookings Institution