Robert H. Frank received his M.A. in statistics from the University of California at Berkeley in 1971, and his Ph.D. in economics in 1972, also from U.C. Berkeley. He is the Goldwin Smith Professor of Economics at Cornell University, where he has taught since 1972 and where he currently holds a joint appointment in the department of economics and the Johnson Graduate School of Management. He has published on a variety of subjects, including price and wage discrimination, public utility pricing, the measurement of unemployment spell lengths, and the distributional consequences of direct foreign investment. For the past several years, his research has focused on rivalry and cooperation in economic and social behaviour.
During Dr Sarah Jennings' teaching career she has been a lecturer in-charge of units in the following fields: Microeconomics Theory, Natural Resource and Environmental Economics, Cost Benefit Analysis and International Trade Theory and Policy. Sarah has also been involved in the teaching of units in a range of other fields including: Macroeconomics, Quantitative Techniques and Econometrics. While most of her teaching assignments have been at the undergraduate level Sarah has delivered a number of specialist courses and seminars to generalist graduate audiences, particularly in the field of natural resource economics and economic policy. Sarah is also involved in teaching economics in the Master of Business Administration and the Master of Professional Accounting.Sarah's involvement in teaching introductory micro economics spans a twenty year period and has required responses to a number of key drivers of change. These have included declining availability of teaching resources and increasing class size; the move to Web-based and flexible delivery; growth in international student numbers; changes in the skill-set of the first-year student population and in the nature of the work environment for which students are being prepared; multiple campus institutions; increasing costs to students of purchasing a tertiary education and movement toward a client/provider relationship; and heightened competition from other commerce-based disciplines such as management and marketing, and from other tertiary education providers. While these pressures have inevitably changed the way we do business as economics educators, the fundamental aims of a foundation unit in economics are still to equip students with a set of practical skills that can be applied to improve their understanding of decision making in situations involving choice and to provide them with the foundations upon which to build their further studies of economics. Both aims require that students learn to see the nature of the economic problem in a wide range of everyday personal, business and social environments and to interpret the behaviour and events they observe as the outcome of economic choices. In other words, they must be taught to think like an economist.
Professor Bernanke received his B.A. in economics from Harvard University in 1975 and his Ph.D. in economics from MIT in 1979. He taught at the Stanford Graduate School of Business from 1979 to 1985 and moved to Princeton University in 1985, where he was named the Howard Harrison and Gabrielle Snyder Beck Professor of Economics and Public Affairs and where he served as chair of the Economics Department. Professor Bernanke is currently a Distinguished Fellow in Residence with the Economic Studies Program at the Brookings Institution. Professor Bernanke was sworn in on February 1, 2006, as chair and a member of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System; his second term expired January 31, 2014. Professor Bernanke also served as chair of the Federal Open Market Committee, the Fed's principal monetary policymaking body. Professor Bernanke was also chair of the President's Council of Economic Advisers from June 2005 to January 2006.Professor Bernanke's intermediate textbook, with Andrew Abel and Dean Croushore, Macroeconomics, Ninth Edition (Addison-Wesley, 2017), is a best seller in its field. He has authored numerous scholarly publications in macroeconomics, macroeconomic history, and finance. He has done significant research on the causes of the Great Depression, the role of financial markets and institutions in the business cycle, and measurement of the effects of monetary policy on the economy. Professor Bernanke has held a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Sloan Fellowship, and he is a Fellow of the Econometric Society and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He served as the director of the Monetary Economics Program of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) and as a member of the NBER's Business Cycle Dating Committee. From 2001 to 2004 he served as editor of the American Economic Review, and as president of the American Economic Association in 2019. Professor Bernanke's work with civic and professional groups includes having served two terms as a member of the Montgomery Township (New Jersey) Board of Education.
