Research at the BIS

Harold James is the Claude and Lore Kelly Professor in European Studies at Princeton University, Professor of History and International Affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School, and an associate at the Bendheim Center for Finance.

Professor James is an economic historian, specialising in the history of Germany, Europe and globalisation. His books include a study of the interwar depression in Germany (1986); International Monetary Cooperation Since Bretton Woods (1996); The End of Globalization (2001); The Creation and Destruction of Value: The Globalization Cycle (2009) and Making the European Monetary Union (2012); Seven Crashes (2023) shortlisted for 2024 Lionel Gelber Prize.

He is the official historian of the International Monetary Fund and a senior fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation. In 2004, he was awarded the Helmut Schmidt Prize for Economic History, and in 2005 the Ludwig Erhard Prize for writing about economics.

Frank is former Director General of DG Economics at the European Central Bank and a professor of economics at the Department of Economics of Ghent University.

Frank has an extensive publication record on monetary economics and applied macroeconomics. As the head of the ECB economics departments, he has been responsible for the economic analysis of the euro area economy, including the macroeconomic projections, as a basis for ECB monetary policy decisions. He is also a research fellow at the Centre for Economic Policy Research in London.

Professor Marc Flandreau, the Howard S Marks Professor of Economic History at the University of Pennsylvania, is a globally recognised expert in the economic history of international money, finance and debt.

He is the founding editor of Capitalism, A Journal of Economics and History and has authored influential works such as The Glitter of Gold (Oxford 2003) and The rise and fall of the dollar (European Review of Economic History 2009, with Barry Eichengreen).

His expertise spans academia and the private sector, including his role as Chief Economist France with Lehman Brothers (2002–2008). He chairs the Historical Monetary and Financial Statistics (HMFS) network under the BIS Irving Fisher Committee on Central Bank Statistics (IFC).

Enrique G Mendoza is Presidential Professor of Economics at the University of Pennsylvania and Co-Editor of the Journal of International Economics. He joined the University of Pennsylvania in 2013 and served as Director of the Penn Institute for Economic Research from 2014 to 2020. Before that, he was Neil Moskowitz Professor of Economics at the University of Maryland and held positions at Duke University, the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve and the IMF. He is a 1989 PhD from the University of Western Ontario, an NBER Research Associate and a member of the BIS Advisory Panel and the Latin American Shadow Financial Regulatory Committee. He has served on the NSF Economics panel and on the editorial boards of several journals, including the American Economic Review. In 2017, he was awarded the ECB's Wim Duisenberg fellowship.

His research focuses on international capital flows, financial crises, sovereign debt and international business cycles. His main publications include: "Optimal, time-consistent macroprudential policy" with J Bianchi, Journal of Political Economy, 2018; "A general equilibrium model of sovereign default and business cycles" with V Yue, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2012; "Sudden stops, financial crises and leverage", American Economic Review, 2010; "Financial integration, financial development and global imbalances" with V Quadrini and J V Rios-Rull, Journal of Political Economy, 2009; and "Real business cycles in a small open economy", American Economic Review, 1991.

Ricardo Reis is A W Phillips Professor of Economics, London School of Economics and Political Science.

Professor Reis received his PhD from Harvard University, and has previously held professorships at Columbia University and Princeton University.

He has published widely on macroeconomics. His main areas of research are inflation expectations, unconventional monetary policies and the central bank's balance sheet, disagreement and inattention, business cycle models with inequality, automatic stabilisers, sovereign bond-backed securities, and the role of capital misallocation in the European slump and crisis. Recent honours include the 2016 Bernacer prize for best European economist under the age of 40 working in macroeconomics and finance, and the 2017 Bank of France / Toulouse School of Economics junior prize in monetary economics, finance and bank supervision for a European researcher.

Professor Reis is an academic consultant at the Bank of England and the Federal Reserve System, directs the ESRC Centre for Macroeconomics in the UK, and serves on the council or as an adviser of multiple organisations.

Fernando Alvarez is the inaugural Saieh Family Professor at the Department of Economics, University of Chicago. He is a Fellow of the Econometric Society, an Economic Theory Fellow, a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Professor Alvarez has held many distinguished professional appointments, including Editor of the Journal of Political Economy and Associate Editor of the Review of Economic Dynamics. He has received grants from the National Science Foundation, the Goldman Sachs Global Markets Institute (as a fellow), the European Research Council, the Banque de France Foundation, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation (as fellow) and the Tinker Foundation. He has been a Visiting Scholar at the Enaudi Institute of Economics and Finance and the Research Department of the European Central Bank (as the Wim Duisenberg Fellow), a consultant at the Research Departments of the Federal Reserve of Minneapolis, the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond and the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, and a Visiting Researcher advising the Board of Directors of the Central Bank of Argentina.

Professor Alvarez has an outstanding record of publications in macroeconomics, dynamic general equilibrium models, monetary economics, and asset pricing in all the leading peer-reviewed academic. His recent research includes work on frictional labor markets, information disclosure, money demand and payment choices, and nominal rigidities on firms' price setting.

Robert Townsend is the Elizabeth & James Killian Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Professor Townsend has held distinguished academic positions at the University of Chicago and Carnegie Mellon University and visiting professorships at Yale, University College London, the London School of Economics, the University of Chicago and Stanford. He is Research Associate at the NBER, Distinguished Research Fellow at the Becker Friedman Institute and Associate at the University of Chicago Department of Economics.

He has a distinguished record of publications, with several books and many journal articles on financial systems in developing and developed economies, financial structure and economic organisations, monetary theory and macroeconomics, and micro level studies on household finances in village economies and in urban neighbourhoods. He has received many professional and academic distinctions and awards including member of the National Academy of Sciences, member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, two Frisch Medals, the Jean-Jacques Laffont Prize, Fellow of the Econometric Society, the Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory (SAET), and the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR).

Professor Townsend has been a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Banks of Minneapolis and New York and adviser to the Federal Reserve Banks of Chicago and Boston, the IMF and the World Bank.

Catherine Schenk is Professor of Economic and Social History at the University of Oxford and a Professorial Fellow at St Hilda's College, Oxford.

Professor Schenk has held academic positions at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, Royal Holloway, University of London and the University of Glasgow. Professor Schenk is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, the Royal Historical Society and the Academy of Social Sciences. Outside academia, she has spent time as a visiting Research Fellow at the International Monetary Fund and at the Hong Kong Institute for Monetary Research.

She has a distinguished record of publications, with several books and journal articles on the history of central banking, international monetary systems and global finance. Her research interests focus primarily on international economic relations, international monetary system and international banking and finance.

Professor Amit Seru is the Steven and Roberta Denning Professor of Finance at the Graduate School of Business, Stanford University. He is also a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research.

His primary research interest is in corporate finance and banking. He has made path-breaking contributions to the study of financial intermediation and regulation, the interaction of the internal organisation of firms with financing and investment, and incentive provision in firms. He is a co-editor of the Journal of Finance and has a distinguished record of influential publications in economics and finance.

Bengt Holmström, the Paul A. Samuelson Professor of Economics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is one of the world's foremost scholars in the application of microeconomic principles to concrete economic issues. He was awarded the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel in 2016, together with Oliver Hart, for contributions to contract theory.

His work examines how to formulate optimal contracts, for example between the owner of a firm and its chief executive, and applies this to corporate governance and to liquidity problems in financial crises. In a paper for the 2014 BIS Annual Conference, he explored the role of debt in the financial system.

Professor Viral V Acharya is the C V Starr Professor of Economics in the Department of Finance at the New York University Stern School of Business.

In addition, he is a member of the Economic Advisory Committee of the Financial Industry Regulation Authority (FINRA), International Advisory Board of the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) and Advisory Committee to the Reserve Bank of India Research Academy. Professor Acharya is also an Academic Advisor to the Federal Reserve Banks of Cleveland and Philadelphia.

His primary research interest is in theoretical and empirical analysis of systemic risk in the financial sector, its nexus with sovereigns, and its implications for monetary policy. Professor Acharya will take up his Fellowship in the summer of 2017.

Markus K Brunnermeier is the Edwards S Sanford Professor of Economics and Director of the Bendheim Center for Finance at Princeton University.

He has a distinguished research record in international financial markets and the macroeconomy with special emphasis on bubbles, liquidity, and financial and monetary stability.