James M. Poterba

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James Michael "Jim" Poterba (born July 13, 1958 ) is an American economist and professor who holds the Mitsui Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology . His research focuses in particular on the influence of taxes on the economic decisions of households and companies. He is also the President of the National Bureau of Economic Research and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1996), the National Academy of Sciences (2015) and the British Academy (2017) as well as the Econometric Society .

education

In 1980 Poterba received an AB in Economics from Harvard College with the top grade summa cum laude . He then moved to Oxford University in England , where he received an M.Phil. in economics and a D.Phil. awarded in economics.

Professional background

After completing his Ph.D. studies, Poterba accepted a position as Assistant Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he was promoted to Associate Professor in 1986 and Full Professor in 1988 , before becoming the Mitsui Professorship in 1996 got transferred for economics. At MIT, Poterba was Deputy Dean of the Department of Economics (1996-2006) and Dean (2006-2008). Poterba also taught in 1988 as a visiting professor of finance at the Graduate Business School of the University of Chicago . Furthermore, Poterba has been a trustee of the TIAA-CREF since 2006 .

Poterba's career is closely linked to the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER): There he was initially Associate Director of the NBER Taxation Research Program (1989–1991) and later as Director of the NBER Public Economics Research Program (1991–2006). In 2008 Poterba was elected President and CEO of the NBER, which met with positive reactions from the academic world.

Poterba also works as an editor or board member for the business journals Journal of Wealth Management (since 1998), the Retirement Income Review (since 2002), the Journal of Public Economics (since 1995) and the National Tax Journal (since 2007). He has previously edited for the RAND Journal of Economics , the Journal of Finance , the Review of Economics and Statistics , Regional Science and Urban Economics, and the Journal of Investment Consulting .

research

According to the economic publications database IDEAS , Poterba is among the 1% of the most research-intensive economists (42nd place) in the overall ranking. Poterba also clearly belongs to the top 5% of the economists recorded in the database under criteria such as "number of quotations" or "number of works". Poterba's most cited article is entitled " Investor Diversification and International Equity Markets " (1991) and co- authored with Kenneth French . In this article, Kenneth and Poterba examine the paradox of why, despite the scientific recognition of the benefits of international portfolio diversification, most investors put almost all of their wealth in domestic assets. To this end, they are developing new estimates for the international equity portfolio balances of investors from the United States , Japan and Great Britain and determine that over 98% of the equity portfolios of Japanese investors are invested in domestic assets, while the respective percentages for the USA are 94% and for Great Britain are at 82%. Building on this, the authors use a simple investor preference model to show that current portfolio patterns imply that investors expect significantly higher returns on investments in their home markets than elsewhere. This lack of diversification appears to be the result of investor preferences rather than institutional pressures.

Other important research work by Poterba was on the relationship between demographic structure and the level of public spending on schooling, the effect of state tax institutions and political circumstances on the dynamics of state taxes and public spending in debt crises, speculation in financial and commodity markets, and economic opportunities and risks of an aging society, the influence of transitive components on the variance of stock returns, the influence of news on stock prices, the effect of changing volatility of individual stock prices on the stock market, the expected present value of the payouts of lifetime annuities or the relationship between the aggregated value of company stocks and changes in consumer spending.

Personal

James Poterba has been married to Nancy Lin Rose since 1984, with whom he has three children - Matthew (1989), Timothy (1991) and Margaret (1994).

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ James Poterba's biography on the MIT website.
  2. ^ Elections to the British Academy celebrate the diversity of UK research. British Academy , July 21, 2017, accessed July 21, 2017 .
  3. ↑ Poterba Succeeds Feldstein at Recession Caller NBER , in: The Wallstreet Journal, February 20, 2008 (English).
  4. ↑ Overall ranking of the economic database IDEAS (English)
  5. ↑ Author profile of James Poterba on IDEAS (English).
  6. ^ French, Kenneth S., James Poterba (1991): Investor Diversification and International Equity Markets (English).
  7. ^ Demographic Structure and the Political Economy of Public Education (1997)
  8. ^ Demographic Structure and the Political Economy of Public Education (1994)
  9. ↑ Speculative Dynamics (1991)
  10. ^ To Aging Society: Opportunity Or Challenge
  11. ^ Mean Reversion in Stock Prices: Evidence and Implications
  12. ↑ What Moves Stock Prices? (1989)
  13. ↑ The Persistence of Volatility and Stock Market Fluctuations (1986)
  14. ^ New Evidence on the Money's Worth of Individual Annuities
  15. ^ Stock Market Wealth and Consumption

Web links

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personal data
SURNAME Poterba, James
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Poterba, James Michael (full name); Poterba, Jim (nickname)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American economist and university professor
DATE OF BIRTH July 13, 1958