The Australian Author

Professor Nilss Olekalns received his BEc with Honours in economics from the University of Adelaide in 1982 and completed an MEc at the Australian National University in 1984. He was awarded his PhD in economics in 1993 from LaTrobe University. He began teaching in the Department of Economics at the University of Melbourne in 1994 where, for the last ten years, he has lectured to first year students in Macroeconomics. He has been a visiting scholar at the International Monetary Fund, a guest lecturer at the Monetary Authority of Singapore and an invited lecturer for the Australian and New Zealand School of Government.

Professor Olekalns has published on a variety of macroeconomic topics including fiscal and monetary policies, exchange rates, output and inflation volatility, and interest rates. He has also written articles on applied microeconomics, including an analysis of the impact of antismoking policies in Australia that was awarded the Economic Society of Australia’s prize for the best paper published in the Economic Record in 2000. His papers have appeared in The Journal of Political Economy, The Review of Economics and Statistics, The Journal of Macroeconomics, The Journal of International Money and Finance, the Southern Economic Journal, The Economic Record, as well as many other international journals. He has also received numerous awards for his teaching including the inaugural Edward Wood Prize for Teaching Excellence. He is currently Head of the Department of Economics at the University of Melbourne.

The US Authors

Professor Ben S Bernanke received his BA in economics from Harvard University in 1975 and his PhD in economics from MIT in 1979. He taught at the Stanford Graduate School of Business from 1979 to 1985 and moved to Princeton University in 1985, where he was the Howard Harrison and Gabrielle Snyder Beck Professor of Economics and Public Affairs, as well as Chairman of the Economics Department. He has consulted for the Board of Governors of the European Central Bank and other central banks, and he served on a US State Department Committee advising the Israeli Government on economic policy. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Fellow of the Econometrics Society, and a Research Associate for the National Bureau of Economic Research. He has been a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve System in Boston, Philadelphia, and New York. In August 2002, he was appointed to the Board of Governors and is now the Chairman of the US Federal Reserve.

Professor Bernanke’s intermediate textbook, with Andrew Abel, Macroeconomics, Fourth Edition (Addison-Wesley, 2001), is a best seller in its field. He has written more than 50 scholarly publications in macroeconomics, macroeconomic history and finance. He has done significant research on the causes of the Great Depression, the role of financial markets and institutions in the business cycle, and measuring the effects of monetary policy on the economy. His two most recent books, both published by Princeton University Press, are Inflation Targeting: Lessons from the International Experience (with co-authors) and Essays on the Great Depression. He has been editor of the American Economic Review and the co-editor of the NBER Macroeconomics Annual and of Economics Letters. He has served as associate editor for the Journal of Financial Intermediation, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the Journal of Money, Credit, and Banking, and the Review of Economics and Statistics. Professor Bernanke has taught economics at both Stanford and Princeton.

Professor Robert H Frank received his BS from Georgia Tech in 1966, then taught maths and science for two years as a Peace Corps volunteer in rural Nepal. He received his MA in statistics and his PhD in economics in 1972 from the University of California at Berkeley. He is the H J Louis Professor of Economics at the Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell University, where he has taught since 1972. During a leave of absence from Cornell, he served as chief economist for the Civil Aeronautics Board (1978- 1980), a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (1992-1993), and Professor of American Civilization at l’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris (2000-2001).

Professor Frank is the author of a best-selling intermediate economics textbook-Microeconomics and Behavior, Seventh Edition (McGraw-Hill Irwin, 2008). He has published on a variety of subjects, including price and wage discrimination, public utility pricing, the measurement of unemployment spell lengths, and the distributional consequences of direct foreign investment. His research has focused on rivalry and cooperation in economic and social behavior. His books on these themes include Choosing the Right Pond, Passions Within Reason and What Price the Moral High Ground? He and Philip Cook are co-authors of The Winner-Take-All Society, which received a Critic’s Choice Award and appeared on both the New York Times Notable Books list and Business Week Ten Best list for 1995. His most recent general interest publication, Luxury Fever, was named on the Knight-Ridder Best Books list for 1999. He was awarded an Andrew W. Mellon Professorship (1987-1990), a Kenan Enterprise Award (1993), a Merrill Scholars Program Outstanding Educator Citation (1991), and the Russell Distinguished Teaching Award (2004). Professor Frank’s introductory microeconomics course has graduated more than 6000 enthusiastic economic naturalists over the years.