Biography of Dr. Kristin J. Forbes

Kristin J. Forbes was appointed as a Member of the Council of Economic Advisers by President George W. Bush on May 15, 2003. She was confirmed by the United States Senate on October 17, 2003, and served until June 3, 2005. Dr. Forbes is on leave from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Sloan School of Management, where she is the Mitsubishi Career Development Chair and Associate Professor of International Management. During 2001-2002, Dr. Forbes worked in the U.S. Treasury Department as the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Quantitative Policy Analysis, Latin American and Caribbean Nations. At the start of 2003, she was honored as one of the "Global Leaders for Tomorrow" as part of the World Economic Forum at Davos.

Dr. Forbes' research addresses a number of important policy-related questions in international finance and development economics. Her recent work examines the impact of capital controls on investment decisions, as well as the effect of currency depreciations and financial crises on companies around the globe. Dr. Forbes has also written extensively on stock market contagion (such as the paper "No Contagion, Only Interdependence: Measuring Stock Market Comovements," Journal of Finance, 2002) and recently co-edited a book International Financial Contagion (2001). Dr. Forbes' other research explores the relationship between income inequality and economic growth, such as the article "A Reassessment of the Relationship Between Inequality and Growth" (American Economic Review, 2000). Dr. Forbes was awarded the Milken Award for Distinguished Economic Research in 2000.

Dr. Forbes is currently a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research. She was honored as Sloan School of Management's "Teacher of the Year" in 2001. She has recently been a visiting scholar at the U.S. Federal Reserve Board, Indian Council of Research on International Economic Relations (ICRIER) and International Monetary Fund (IMF). Prior to joining MIT, Dr. Forbes worked in the investment banking division at Morgan Stanley, in the policy research department at the World Bank, and in the economics group at Fleet Financial Institutions.

Dr. Forbes received her Ph.D. in Economics at MIT in 1998, where she won the Solow Prize for excellence in teaching and research. She obtained her BA, summa cum laude with highest honors from Williams College in 1992.