April 14, 2014
Annual Economics Club Debate will be April 17
Submitted by Joseph Dasenbrock
The annual Economics Club Debate is scheduled for 6:30 p.m. Thursday, April 17, in 105 Umberger Hall.
The topic of debate is the Federal Reserve's monetary policy decisions since the ending of the Great Recession in 2009. This will include the highly controversial quantitative easing, which is a large scale asset purchase program engineered to hold interest rates low in effort to stimulate the economy.
Everyone is welcome to attend.
Below is a description of the debating economists.
Mark Thoma is an associate professor of economics at the University of Oregon. He joined the university faculty in 1987 and served as head of the economics department for five years. His research involves the effects that changes in monetary policy have on inflation, output, unemployment, interest rates and other macroeconomic variables and he has conducted research in other areas, such as the relationship between the political party in power and macroeconomic outcomes. He received his doctorate from Washington State University.
Steve Williamson received a Bachelor of Science in mathematics and an master's degree in economics both from Queen's University in Kingston, Canada, and a doctorate in economics from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He has held full-time positions at the Bank of Canada, Queen's University, the University of Western Ontario, the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, and the University of Iowa. Currently, in addition to his faculty position at Washington University in St. Louis, Williamson holds visiting positions at the Richmond Federal Reserve Bank and the St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank. His current research in new monetarist economics addresses the role of money, credit, and banking in the macroeconomy and the effects of monetary policy. Williamson teaches graduate monetary economics, graduate macroeconomics, and undergraduate intermediate macroeconomics. His publications include articles in the Journal of Political Economy, the American Economic Review, the Review of Economic Studies, the Journal of Monetary Economics, the Journal of Economic Theory, and the International Economic Review, among others. As well, he has published an intermediate level undergraduate macroeconomics text book, Macroeconomics, now in its fourth edition in the U.S. and its third edition in Canada. Williamson is a senior associate editor of the Journal of Monetary Economics, and an associate editor of the Review of Economic Dynamics.