Ben Bernanke

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/jofi.12274
• Published date: 01 June 2015
• Date: 01 June 2015

Fellow of the American Finance Association for 2015 v

Ben Bernanke

BEN BERNANKE WAS BORN IN AUGUSTA, Georgia, in 1953, and grew up in Dillon,

South Carolina. He attended Harvard College (BA in economics, summa, 1975)

and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Ph.D. in economics, 1979).

From 1979 to 1985, he was an assistant professor and then associate professor

at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. He joined the faculty of Prince-

ton University in 1985, where he was jointly appointed in the Department of

Economics and the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.

From 1994 to 1996, Bernanke was the Class of 1926 Professor of Economics

and Public Affairs and from 1996 to 2002 he was the Howard Harrison and

Gabrielle Snyder Beck Professor of Economics and Public Affairs. At Princeton

he also served as the chair of the Economics Department from 1996 to 2002

and as the founding Director of the Bendheim Center for Finance from 1997 to

1998.

In 2002 Bernanke became a member of the Board of Governors of the Fed-

eral Reserve System, and he served as the Chairman of the President’s Council

of Economic Advisers from June 2005 to January 2006. From February 2006

through January 2014, Bernanke served two terms as the Chairman of the

Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors as well as Chairman of the Federal Open

Market Committee, the System’s principal monetary policymaking body. As

Chairman, Bernanke led the Federal Reserve’s efforts to contain the finan-

cial crisis of 2007–2009 and to support the ensuing economic recovery. Since

February 2014 he has been a Distinguished Fellow in Residence at the Brook-

ings Institution in Washington, DC.

Bernanke’s research has focused on macroeconomics, monetary economics,

and economic history. Much of his work considers how developments in the

financial sector affect macroeconomic performance. For example, in “Non-

Monetary Effects of the Financial Crisis in the Propagation of the Great Depres-

sion” (1983), he provided evidence that the weakening of lender and borrower

balance sheets and the resulting decline in credit flows worsened the Depres-

sion. With Mark Gertler and later also with Simon Gilchrist, he developed the

idea of the financial accelerator, which holds that the deterioration of finan-

cial conditions in recessions increases the depth and persistence of downturns.

Models that include a financial accelerator, such as “The Financial Accelerator

in a Quantitative Business Cycle Framework” (1999), have subsequently been

used to analyze the effects of a financial crisis on the broader economy. In other