Two New Directors Elected to NBER Board

Diana Farrell has been elected an at-large member of the NBER Board of Directors. She is president and CEO of the JPMorgan Chase Institute, which carries out economic and policy research using the rich administrative data resources that arise from the firm's client interactions. Previously, she was a senior partner at McKinsey & Company, where she was the global head of the McKinsey Center for Government and the McKinsey Global Institute. 

Farrell served in the White House as deputy director of the National Economic Council and Deputy Assistant to the President on Economic Policy, 2009-10, and was a member of the President's Auto Recovery Task Force. She currently serves on the board of directors of eBay, the Urban Institute, and the Washington International School. She is a trustee emerita of Wesleyan University, and was a co-chair of the World Economic Forum's Council on Economic Progress. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Aspen Strategy Group. 

She holds a BA from Wesleyan University, which has awarded her a distinguished alumna award, and an MBA from Harvard Business School.

Samuel Kortum, the James Burrows Moffatt Professor of Economics at Yale University, is Yale's new representative on the board. Kortum's principal areas of research are international economics, industrial organization, and macroeconomics. In 2004, he and Jonathan Eaton shared the Econometric Society's Frisch Medal for their paper "Technology, Geography, and Trade," which provided a framework that has been applied in many subsequent studies of trade patterns. The researchers were honored with the 2018 Onassis Prize in International Trade. 

Kortum taught at Boston University, the University of Minnesota, and the University of Chicago before joining the Yale faculty. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Fellow of the Econometric Society, and a past editor of the Journal of Political Economy. He has been an NBER affiliate since 1993 and spent the 1999-2000 academic year at the NBER as a National Fellow. 

Kortum received his BA from Wesleyan University and his PhD from Yale. 
Ray Fair, Yale's former representative on the NBER board, was elected to emeritus status.