Lecture on the Financial Crisis

The Nashville UNA invites you to attend this timely lecture, free and open to the public. We have cancelled our February UNA Seminar, planned for the same date and time, and urge our members and friends to join us here: Vanderbilt University, McGee Public Policy Lecture - Thursday, February 19th, 4 pm with Professor Robert E. Hall of Stanford University titled, “The Financial Crisis and the Recession: What is Happening and What the Government Should Do” in Wilson Hall, Room 103 with reception following in nearby Calhoun Hall, Room 415A.

Robert E. Hall is the Robert and Carole McNeil Hoover Senior Fellow and Professor of Economics at Stanford University. He is an applied economist with interests in employment issues, technology, competition, and economic policy in the aggregate economy and in particular markets. His current research focuses on levels of employment and output in market economies and on the economics of high technology.

Hall is President-elect of the American Economic Association and will serve as President in 2010. He presented the Ely Lecture to the Association in 2001 and served as Vice President in 2005.

Along with Hoover Institution colleague Alvin Rabushka, Hall developed a framework for equitable and efficient consumption taxation. Their article in the Wall Street Journal in December 1981 was the starting point for an upsurge of interest in consumption taxation. The proposal is spelled out in more detail in their book, The Flat Tax (Hoover Institution Press). The pair was recognized in Money magazine's Money Hall of Fame for their contributions to financial innovation.

Hall is coauthor, with Marc Lieberman, of Economics: Principles and Applications.

Hall also serves as director of the research program on economic fluctuations and growth of the National Bureau of Economic Research. He is chairman of the Bureau's Committee on Business Cycle Dating, which maintains the semiofficial chronology of the U.S. business cycle.

Hall has advised a number of government agencies on national economic policy, including the Justice Department, the Treasury Department, the Federal Reserve Board, and the Congressional Budget Office, where he serves on the Advisory Committee. He served on the National Presidential Advisory Committee on Productivity. He has testified on numerous occasions before congressional committees concerning national economic policy. Before joining Stanford’s Department of Economics in 1978, Hall taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and at the University of California, Berkeley. He received his B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1964 and his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1967.