About the Authors

Rudi Dornbusch, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Rudi Dornbusch is a Ford Professor of Economics and International Management at MIT. He did his undergraduate work in Switzerland and holds a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. He has taught at Chicago, at Rochester, and since 1975 at MIT. His research is primarily in international economics, with a major macroeconomic component. His special research interests are the behavior of exchange rates, high inflation and hyperinflation, and the problems and opportunities that high capital mobility poses for developing economies. He visits and lectures extensively in Europe and in Latin America, where he takes an active interest in problems of stabilization policy, and has held visiting appointments in Brazil and Argentina. His writing includes Open Economy Macroeconomics and, with Stanley Fischer and Richard Schmalensee, Economics. His interests in public policy take him frequently to testify before Congress and to participate in international conferences. He regularly contributes newspaper editorials on current policy issues here and abroad. http://web.mit.edu/rudi/www/

Stanley Fischer, International Monetary Fund, on leave from MIT

Stanley Fischer is First Deputy Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund, on leave from the Department of Economics at MIT. He was an undergraduate at the London School of Economics and has a Ph.D. from MIT. He taught at the University of Chicago while Rudi Dornbusch was a student there, starting a long friendship and collaboration. He has been a member of the faculty of the MIT Economics Department since 1973. During that period he has taken leaves at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and at Stanford. From 1988 to 1990 he was Chief Economist at the World Bank. He joined the IMF in 1994. His main research interests are economic growth and development; international economics and macroeconomics, particularly inflation and its stabilization; and the economics of transition. www.imf.org/external/np/omd/bios/sf.htm

Richard Startz, University of Washington

Richard Startz is Castor Professor of Economics at the University of Washington. He was an undergraduate at Yale University and received his Ph.D. from MIT, where he studied under Stanley Fischer and Rudi Dornbusch. He taught at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania before moving on to the University of Washington, and he has taught, while on leave, at the University of California - San Diego, the Stanford Business School, and Princeton. His principal research areas are macroeconomics, econometrics, and the economics of race. In the area of macroeconomics, much of his work has concentrated on the microeconomic underpinnings of macroeconomic theory. His work on race is part of a long-standing collaboration with Shelly Lundberg. www.econ.washington.edu/user/startz

Frank Atkins, University of Calgary

Frank Atkins is an Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Calgary. He received a B.A. and an M.A. from the University of Guelph, in 1979, and then spent two years at the Bank of Canada as an Economic Analyst. In 1981, he left the Bank of Canada to pursue a Ph.D. in economics at Queen's University at Kingston. He graduated in 1985, and joined the faculty at the University of Calgary. His main areas of interest are monetary policy and the application of time series analysis to macroeconomic data. He has published many articles in leading economic journals, and is a frequent commentator on macroeconomic issues for the major national networks. Frank lives in Calgary, Alberta with his wife Laurie and their two children Dan and Andrea. You can visit his webpage at http://econ.ucalgary.ca/atkins.htm.

Gordon Sparks, Queen's University

Gordon Sparks has a B.A., mathematics degree from the University of Toronto and an M.A. and a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Michigan. He is currently Emeritus Professor of Economics at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario. Gordon Sparks has been a consultant for the Bank of Canada, an Assistant Professor at MIT (1965-1967), and Visiting Professor at MIT (1981 to 1982). His fields of interest include monetary policy and exchange rates, monetary integration in Europe, and the use of time series methods to analyze historical data. He teaches a course on the Economics of the European Union at the International Study Center (Queen's University) at Herstmonceux Castle in the U.K. His articles have been published in various jounals including the Canadian Journal of Economics, Econometrica, and Explorations in Economic History. Gordon Sparks also carried out a research study on monetary policy for the Royal Commission on the Economic Union and Development Prospects for Canada (the MacDonald Commission).