8th Annual Keynote Speakers

N. Gregory Mankiw

Dr. Mankiw, professor of economics at Harvard University, is a prolific writer, whose work appears in such periodicals as The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, and is a regular participant in academic and policy debates. His publications are ranked among the most influential over the last three decades. He did important work on menu costs, which are a source of price stickiness. In 1989, he wrote a paper arguing that the aging of the baby boomers was going to undermine the housing market in the 1990s and 2000s. He worked as a staff economist for the Council of Economic Advisers from 1982–83, foreshadowing his later position as chairman of that organization. He earned his PhD in Economics from MIT in 1984. His famous Principles of Economics, published by Cengage Learning, has sold more than two million copies in seventeen languages.

James D. Gwartney

James Gwartney holds the Gus A. Stavros Eminent Scholar Chair at Florida State University, where he directs the Stavros Center for the Advancement of Free Enterprise and Economic Education. His writings have been widely published in both professional journals and popular media. He is the co-author of Common Sense Economics: What Everyone Should Know about Wealth and Prosperity (St. Martin's Press, 2005), a primer on economics and personal finance. Gwartney's current research focuses on the measurement and determination of factors that influence cross-country differences in income levels and growth rates.

Daniel Gross

Daniel Gross is one of the most widely read financial and economic writers working today. A former editor at Newsweek, he wrote the "Contrary Indicator" column, which he now writes for Yahoo! Finance. Before joining Newsweek in the spring of 2007, Mr. Gross wrote the "Economic View" column in the New York Times, was a contributing writer to New York, and contributed regularly to magazines such as Fortune and Wired. From 1998-2007, Gross served as the editor of STERNBusiness, a semi-annual academic magazine on economics and management published by the New York University Stern School of Business.

Alan S. Blinder

Alan S. Blinder has been on the Princeton faculty since 1971, taking time off from January 1993 through January 1996 for service in the U.S. government, —first as a member of President Clinton’'s original Council of Economic Advisers, and then as Vice Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. In addition to his academic writings (books, academic articles) and his best-selling introductory textbook, he has written many newspaper and magazine columns and op-eds and, in recent years, has been a regular columnist for The Wall Street Journal. He also appears frequently on television on PBS, CNBC, CNN, Bloomberg, and others. Dr. Blinder is a Distinguished Fellow and past vice president of the American Economic Association, a past president of the Eastern Economic Association, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the American Academy of Political and Social Science.