The 2008 John F. Nash, Jr. Lecture

Dr. Susan C. Athey

Susan C. Athey serves as a professor of economics at Harvard University and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. She received the John Bates Clark Medal in 2007 at the age of 36 and thus is the first female winner of the most prestigious economics award behind the Nobel prize. Dr. Athey edits the new American Economic Journals: Microeconomics, published by the American Economic Association. She served as an associate editor of the American Economic Review, Review of Economic Studies, and the RAND Journal of Economics and currently serves as an associate editor for Econometrica, Theoretical Economics, and Quarterly Journal of Economics. Her research interests include mathematical methods and tools for theoretical modeling, auctions, industrial organization, econometric identification, and organizational design. Her recent empirical work has focused on the effects of the design of timber auctions on the types of bidders who participate, revenue, and the prevalence of collusion.

For a comprehensive autobiography, please visit the following website.

Previous Nash Lecturers

Grant D. Aldonas

The 2007 Nash Lecture was delivered by Grant Aldonas, former U.S. Under Secretary of Commerce for International Trade.

For a comprehensive autobiography, please refer to his website.

Thomas C. Schelling

The 2006 Nash Lecture was delivered by Dr. Thomas Schelling, the 2005 Nobel Laureate in economics.

For a comprehensive autobiography, please refer to his website.

John F. Nash, Jr.

Download John F. Nash, Jr.'s lecture!

Dr. Nash shared the Nobel prize in 1994 with John C. Harsanyi and Reinhard Selten for their analysis of equilibria in the theory of non-cooperative games. He is currently a Senior Researcher in the Mathematics Department at Princeton University. His major works include remarkable contributions to the fields of mathematics and economics and include:

• Equilibrium points in N-Person Games, 1950, Proceedings of NAS.
• The Bargaining Problem, 1950, Econometrica.
• A Simple Three-Person Poker Game, with L.S. Shapley, 1950, Annals of Mathematical Statistics.
• Non-Cooperative Games, 1951, Annals of Mathematics.
• Two-Person Cooperative Games, 1953, Econometrica.

For a comprehensive autobiography, please refer to his page on the Nobel website.

Maurice Obstfeld

Maurice Obstfeld is the Class of 1958 Professor of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley. His interests are in international finance and macroeconomics, areas in which he has published a number of research articles. Professor Obstfeld received his Ph.D. from MIT, later teaching at Columbia, the University of Pennsylvania, and Harvard before moving to Berkeley. He has served as a consultant for the IMF, World Bank, European Commission, and several central banks.

His most recent book, coauthored with Kenneth Rogoff, is Foundations of International Macroeconomics (1996). He is also the author, together with Paul Krugman, of International Economics: Theory and Policy, which is now in its fourth edition and has been translated into Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, Chinese, Polish, and Russian. He is a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Research, a Research Fellow of the Centre for Economic Policy Research, and a Fellow of the Econometric Society.

Closing Speaker

Edwin Truman

Edwin M. Truman is a senior fellow at the Institute for International Economics in Washington, DC. He served as Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Treasury for International Affairs from December 1998 to January 2001. Before joining the U.S. Treasury, he was Director and later Staff Director of the Division of International Finance of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System beginning in June 1977. He was on the staff of the Federal Open Market Committee from March 1977 until he resigned from the Federal Reserve. He joined the staff of the Federal Reserve in July 1972.

Truman has been a member of numerous international groups working on economic and financial issues, including the Financial Stability Forum’s Working Group on Highly Leveraged Institutions (1999-2000), G-22 Working Party on Transparency and Accountability (1998), G-10-sponsored Working Party on Financial Stability in Emerging Market Economies (1996-1997), G-10 Working Group on the Resolution of Sovereign Liquidity Crises (1995-1996), and G-7 Working Group on Exchange Market Intervention (1982-1983). He has published on international monetary economics, international debt problems, economic development, and European economic integration.