About the Australian author

Philip M. Bodman is Associate Dean, Academic in the Faculty of Business, Economics and Law and an Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Queensland. He did his undergraduate studies and also obtained a Masters degree at the University of Essex in the UK. Phil holds a PhD from Queen’s University in Canada, where he also taught intermediate macroeconomics. As well as intermediate and advanced macroeconomics, he has taught extensively in labour economics, applied econometrics and international economics. Phil is co-ordinator of the Macroeconomics Research Group at the University of Queensland. His research interests are in the areas of macroeconomics (specifically, business cycle modelling and international influences on the Australian economy), public economics and public policy (most recently as Chief Investigator on an Australian Research Council Discovery Grant focusing on fiscal federalism, government decentralisation and macroeconomic performance) and labour economics (in particular, the economics of unemployment and education and the economics of crime). He has been a Visiting Professor at the University of Melbourne and has worked closely with government bodies such as the Queensland Treasury.

About the US authors

Rudi Dornbusch (1942–2002) was Ford Professor of Economics and International Management at MIT. He did his undergraduate work in Switzerland and held a PhD from the University of Chicago. He taught at Chicago, at Rochester, and from 1975 to 2002 at MIT. His research was primarily in international economics, with a major macroeconomic component. His special research interests included the behaviour of exchange rates, high inflation and hyperinflation, and the problems and opportunities that high capital mobility pose for developing economies. He lectured extensively in Europe and Latin America, where he took an active interest in problems of stabilisation policy, and held visiting appointments in Brazil and Argentina. His writing includes Open Economy Macroeconomics and, with Stanley Fischer and Richard Schmalensee, Economics.

Stanley Fischer is Governor of the Bank of Israel. Between February 2002 and April 2005 he was Vice Chairman of Citigroup. Before that, from 1994 to 2001, he was First Deputy Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund. He was an undergraduate at the London School of Economics and has a PhD from MIT. He taught at the University of Chicago while Rudi Dornbusch was a student there, starting a long friendship and collaboration. He was a member of the faculty of the MIT Economics Department from 1973 to 1998. From 1988 to 1990 he was Chief Economist at the World Bank. His main research interests are macroeconomics, particularly inflation and its stabilization, international economics, and economic growth, development and the economics of transition.

Richard Startz is Castor Professor of Economics at the University of Washington. He was an undergraduate at Yale University and received his PhD 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.