About the Author

Robert Frank

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.

Ben Bernanke

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.

Kate Antonovics

Professor Antonovics received her B.A. from Brown University in 1993 and her Ph.D. in economics from the University of Wisconsin in 2000. Shortly thereafter, she joined the faculty in the Economics Department at the University of California, San Diego, where she has been ever since. Professor Antonovics is known for her superb teaching and her innovative use of technology in the classroom. Her highly popular introductory-level microeconomics course regularly enrolls over 450 students each fall. She also teaches labor economics at both the undergraduate and graduate level. In 2012, she received the UCSD Department of Economics award for best undergraduate teaching. Professor Antonovics’s research has focused on racial discrimination, gender discrimination, affirmative action, intergenerational income mobility, learning, and wage dynamics. Her papers have appeared in the American Economic Review, the Review of Economics and Statistics, the Journal of Labor Economics, and the Journal of Human Resources. She is a member of both the American Economic Association and the Society of Labor Economists.

Ori Heffetz

Professor Heffetz received his B.A. in physics and philosophy from Tel Aviv University in 1999 and his Ph.D. in economics from Princeton University in 2005. He is an Associate Professor of Economics at the Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell University, where he has taught since 2005. Bringing the real world into the classroom, Professor Heffetz has created a unique macroeconomics course that introduces basic concepts and tools from economic theory and applies them to current news and global events. His popular classes are taken by hundreds of students every year, on the Cornell Ithaca campus and, via live videoconferencing, in dozens of cities across the U.S., Canada, and beyond. Professor Heffetz’s research studies the social and cultural aspects of economic behavior, focusing on the mechanisms that drive consumers’ choices and on the links between economic choices, individual well-being, and policymaking. He has published scholarly work on household consumption patterns, individual economic decision making, and survey methodology and measurement. He was a visiting researcher at the Bank of Israel during 2011, is currently a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), and serves on the editorial board of Social Choice and Welfare.