Four New Directors Elected to NBER Governing Board
The NBER Board of Directors elected four new members at its September 2020 meeting.
Dana M. Peterson is the new representative of the Conference Board, succeeding Bart van Ark. She serves as chief economist at the Conference Board. Prior to joining that organization, she was the North American and global economist at Citigroup, where she analyzed global economic themes with financial market implications. She also was a researcher in the fiscal analysis section of the Federal Reserve Board. Peterson is the rising first vice-chair of the New York Association for Business Economics. She received an undergraduate degree in economics with honors from Wesleyan University and a masters in economics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Lynn Reaser is the new representative of the National Association of Business Economics, replacing Jack Kleinhenz. She is a faculty member and the chief economist for the Fermanian Business & Economic Institute at Point Loma Nazarene University, and recently completed a four-year term as chief economist of the California Treasurer's Council of Economic Advisors. Reaser was previously the chief economist for the Bank of America Investment Strategies Group and for First Interstate Bank. She is a past president of the National Association for Business Economics (NABE) and has been honored as an NABE Fellow. She received her BA, MA, and PhD degrees in economics from the University of California, Los Angeles.
Lars Stole is the new representative of the University of Chicago, taking up a position previously held by John Gould. Stole is the David W. Johnson Professor of Economics at the Booth School of Business. His research interests include applied contract theory, industrial economics, and game theory. He is a past editor of the RAND Journal of Economics, and the founder of the Applied Theory Initiative at the Booth School, which he co-directed from 2009-2019. He has been an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow, a National Science Foundation Presidential Faculty Fellow, and an Olin Fellow in Law and Economics. Stole received his undergraduate degree from the University of Illinois, an MSc in Economics from the London School of Economics, and a PhD from MIT.
Hal Varian is a new at-large director. He is the chief economist at Google and an emeritus professor in the School of Information, the Haas School of Business, and the Department of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley. He has made important research contributions in industrial organization, consumer search, the theory of public goods, and demand theory. Varian is the author of two successful microeconomic theory textbooks, one graduate and one undergraduate, as well as an early guide to the information economy Information Rules: A Strategic Guide to the Network Economy, with Carl Shapiro. He received his undergraduate degree from MIT and his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley.
In addition to these new appointments, the NBER board elected Elizabeth Bailey of the University of Pennsylvania, formerly an at-large board member and board chair from 2005-2008, to emeritus status.