BEA Advisory Committee

Ernst R. Berndt

Chairman, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Ernst Berndt is the Louis E. Seley Professor in Applied Economics and a professor of applied economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Sloan School of Management. He is a former director of the National Bureau of Economic Research Program on Technological Progress and Productivity Measurement.

Berndt's recent research has focused on the changing dynamics of health care industries, including how medical innovations have affected the costs of treating selected diseases, the globalization of clinical trials, cancer drug shortages in the United States, and incentives for research and development in diseases prevalent in low-income countries.

More generally, his research deals with the sources and measurement of productivity growth. Berndt has implemented methods for adjusting prices for changes in quality in the pharmaceutical, health care, personal computer hardware, prepackaged software and personal digital assistant product categories.

Berndt holds a B.A. in economics and philosophy from Valparaiso University and an M.S. and Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin.

Katharine G. Abraham

University of Maryland

Katharine G. Abraham is professor of economics and survey methodology and director of the Maryland Center for Economics and Policy at the University of Maryland. She served as commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 1993–2001, and as a member of the President's Council of Economic Advisers, 2011–13. 

Abraham served as chairperson of the Commission on Evidence-Based Policymaking, helping Congress develop a strategy for using data to evaluate the government's effectiveness. She also serves on standing academic advisory committees convened by the Congressional Budget Office and the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. 

She is a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research and an elected fellow of the American Statistical Association and the Society of Labor Economists. 

Her research areas include the work and retirement decisions of older Americans and the effects of financial aid on college attendance.

She received her Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University and her B.S. from Iowa State University.

Alan J. Auerbach

University of California, Berkeley

Alan J. Auerbach is the Robert D. Burch Professor of Economics and Law, director of the Burch Center for Tax Policy and Public Finance, and former chair of the Economics Department at the University of California, Berkeley. He is also a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research and previously taught at Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania.

Auerbach was deputy chief of staff of the U.S. Joint Committee on Taxation in 1992 and has been a consultant to government agencies and institutions in the United States and abroad.

He served as an executive committee member and vice president of the American Economic Association; as editor of that association's Journal of Economic Perspectives and American Economic Journal: Economic Policy; and as president of the National Tax Association, receiving the Daniel M. Holland Medal.

He received his Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University and his B.A. in economics and mathematics from Yale University.

Barry P. Bosworth

The Brookings Institution

Barry Bosworth is a senior fellow in the Economic Studies Program (the Robert V. Roosa Chair in International Economics) at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C.

He was director of the President's Council on Wage and Price Stability, 1977–79; a visiting lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley; an assistant professor at Harvard University; and an economist for the White House Council of Economic Advisers, 1968–69.

His research has involved the determinants of economic growth in developing countries, saving, capital formation, and productivity growth.

Some recent publications include: The Decline in Saving: A Threat to America's Prosperity? (2012); The Economy of Puerto Rico: Restoring Growth, with Susan Collins and Miguel A. Soto-Class (2006); Productivity in the U.S. Services Sector: New Sources of Economic Growth, with Jack Triplett (2004); and "Accounting for Growth: Comparing China and India," (with Susan Collins) Journal of Economic Perspectives (2008).

Bosworth received his B.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Michigan.

Robert J. Gordon

Northwestern University

Robert Gordon is the Stanley G. Harris Professor of the Social Sciences at Northwestern University. He is a macroeconomist whose interests include unemployment, inflation, and the long-run and cyclical aspects of labor productivity.

For more than three decades, he has been a member of the National Bureau of Economic Research's Business Cycle Dating Committee. He served on the Boskin Commission to assess the accuracy of the U.S. Consumer Price Index. He is the author of a textbook in intermediate macroeconomics, now in its 12th edition. His new book is The Rise and Fall of American Growth.

Gordon is a fellow of the Econometric Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Distinguished Fellow of the American Economic Association. In 2016, Bloomberg named him to its annual list of 50 most influential people.

Gordon received his Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a B.A. from Oxford University, and a B.A. from Harvard University.

Maurine A. Haver

Haver Analytics, Inc.

Maurine Haver is founder of Haver Analytics, an economic information services company. Haver Analytics provides time series economic data, maintaining more than 200 complex databases with information from more than 1,200 government and private sources, and has an extensive offering of forecast data covering the world's economies.

Haver is a member of the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Data Users Advisory Committee and served on the Financial Research Advisory Committee, advising the Treasury Department about analyzing systemic financial risk. She is the past chair of the Council of Professional Associations on Federal Statistics.

Previously, she was an economist in the economic forecasting group of General Electric in New York, a member of the International Staff of Compagnie Bull General Electric in Paris, and a consultant at Chase Manhattan Bank in London. She served as president of the National Association of Business Economists, 1994–95, and chair of the NABE Statistics Committee.

Charles R. Hulten

University of Maryland

Charles R. Hulten is professor emeritus of economics at the University of Maryland, where he has taught since 1985. He is also a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, chairman of the Conference on Research in Income and Wealth, and senior fellow at The Conference Board.  

His research interests include productivity analysis, economic growth and development, and capital formation and the measurement of economic depreciation. He also researches intangible capital and the effects of intangibles on economic growth and corporate wealth.

Hulten was a senior research associate at the Urban Institute and assistant professor of economics at Johns Hopkins University. He served on the Committee on Economic Statistics of the American Economic Association and also on the Canberra Group advisory committee, in support of the revision of the U.N. System of National Accounts.

He received a B.A. in statistics and a Ph.D. in economics from the University of California, Berkeley.

Dale W. Jorgenson

Harvard University

Dale W. Jorgenson is the Samuel W. Morris University Professor at Harvard University.

He is a former president and distinguished fellow of the American Economic Association and was awarded the association's John Bates Clark Medal.

His research includes work on information technology and economic growth, energy and the environment, tax policy and investment behavior, and applied econometrics. He's the author of more than 300 articles in economics and author or editor of 37 books.

He was a founding member of the Board on Science, Technology, and Economic Policy of the National Research Council and also served as board chairman. He was elected to fellowship in the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Statistical Association, and the Econometric Society, where he also served as president.

Jorgenson was chairman of Harvard's Department of Economics, 1994–97. He received a B.A. in economics from Reed College in Portland, Ore., and his Ph.D. from Harvard University.

Ellen R. McGrattan

Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis

Ellen McGrattan is a consultant at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, a professor of economics at the University of Minnesota, and director of the Heller-Hurwicz Economics Institute.

She is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, a fellow of the Econometric Society, a fellow of the Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory, and president-elect of the Midwest Economics Association.

McGrattan's research is concerned with the aggregate effects of monetary and fiscal policy, in particular the effects on GDP, investment, the allocation of hours, the stock market, and international capital flows. Her recent work reexamines some business cycle puzzles in macroeconomics, considering the fact that some investments are unmeasured.

She has taught at Duke University, European University Institute, University of Pennsylvania, Stockholm School of Economics, and the International Monetary Fund, among others.

McGrattan received her B.S. in economics and mathematics from Boston College and her Ph.D. from Stanford University.

Therese J. McGuire

Northwestern University

Therese J. McGuire is professor of strategy at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.

McGuire's areas of expertise are state and local public finance, fiscal decentralization, property tax limitations, education finance, and regional economic development. She has written about and worked with various governments on state tax reform and on the impact of taxes on economic growth.

In 1989 McGuire worked with a blue-ribbon commission and directed a study of revenues and expenditures for the state of Arizona. McGuire was president of the National Tax Association and has served as editor of the National Tax Journal. Her publications have appeared in the National Tax Journal, the Journal of Regional Science, the Journal of Urban Economics, International Tax and Public Finance, and the Journal of Public Economics.

McGuire has a B.A. with a dual major in mathematics and economics from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and a Ph.D. in economics from Princeton University.

William D. Nordhaus

Yale University

William Nordhaus is Sterling Professor of Economics at Yale University. He is on the research staff of the National Bureau of Economic Research and a member and senior advisor of the Brookings Panel on Economic Activity.

He served on the President's Council of Economic Advisers, 1977-79; served as provost of Yale; and was chair of the Boston Federal Reserve Bank. He's a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Nordhaus has studied wage and price behavior, health economics, augmented national accounting, the political business cycle, and productivity. His study of the economic history of lighting back to Babylonian times found that long-term growth has been significantly underestimated. He is the author of the widely used DICE and RICE models of the economics of climate change.

He completed his undergraduate work at Yale University and received his Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Joel L. Prakken

Macroeconomic Advisers

Joel Prakken is a founding member of the economic consulting firm Macroeconomic Advisers. Before that, he was senior economist at IBM Corp.'s world headquarters and served with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. He has held positions on the faculties of New York University's Graduate School of Business and the Economics Department and the Olin School of Business at Washington University.

He served as a director and as president of the National Association for Business Economics and was president of the Gateway Association of Business Economists in Saint Louis.

Prakken has written papers for the Council of Economic Advisers, the American Council for Capital Formation, and the Center for the American Study of Business on topics including tax reform, budget policy, monetary policy, and the impact of technology on productivity.

Prakken completed his undergraduate degree in economics at Princeton University and received his Ph.D. from Washington University in Saint Louis.

Andrew D. Reamer

George Washington University

Andrew Reamer is a research professor at the George Washington University's Institute of Public Policy. His research efforts, intended to inform the public and decision-makers, aim to encourage U.S. national economic development and competitiveness.

His areas of focus include strategic economic analysis and policy, innovation and entrepreneurship, workforce development, and the federal economic statistics system.

Reamer joined the Institute of Public Policy in 2010, after six years at the Brookings Institution's Metropolitan Policy Program and 20 years as a consultant in U.S. regional economic development and public policy.

Reamer is a member of several federal advisory committees, including the National Advisory Council on Innovation and Entrepreneurship, the Workforce Information Advisory Council, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics Data Users Advisory Committee. 

He received a Ph.D. in economic development and public policy and a master's of city planning from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a B.S. in economics at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania.

Daniel E. Sichel

Wellesley College

Dan Sichel is a professor of economics at Wellesley College. His research interests include macroeconomics, long-run growth and technology. 

As an economist at the Federal Reserve Board, 1988–1993, he worked on a range of macroeconomic issues, including helping to guide the Fed's forecasts and analysis of the U.S. economy. He served as assistant to the chair of the Airline Transportation Stabilization Board, which provided loan guarantees to airlines that suffered losses from the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

While at the Brookings Institution, Sichel wrote The Computer Revolution, a book that analyzed the relationship between information technology and economic growth.

He served as deputy assistant secretary for macroeconomic policy at the U.S. Treasury and senior associate director of the Division of Research and Statistics at the Federal Reserve Board.

He received a Ph.D. in economics from Princeton University and a bachelor's degree in economics and master's degree in public policy from the University of Michigan.