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Ken Kuttner, Chair of the Department of Economics
at Williams College, provides some perspective on world markets and China’s scramble to stay solvent.
The Berkshire Business Outlook Caught up with Ken Kuttner after a couple days of chasing him around Asia. We caught up with him in Queensland, Australia. He was generous with his time and gracious with his answers, supplying insightful answers to my, at times, Econ 101 questions about this past week’s stock market instability and China’s economic house of cards.
Ken Kuttner is a professor of economics at Williams College, and a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. Mr. Kuttner has published numerous articles in the fields of macroeconomics, monetary policy, and financial economics.
His research has addressed such issues as the roles of monetary aggregates and interest rates in monetary policy, inflation targeting, methods for estimating potential output, the Japanese economy, and financial markets’ reaction to shifts in Federal Reserve policy.
An internationally recognized authority on monetary policy issues, Mr. Kuttner is a frequent speaker in academic and policy forums, and he has been a visiting scholar at the central banks of Australia, Malaysia, New Zealand, Japan, and Portugal. He is also affiliated with the Center on Japanese Economy and Business at Columbia Business School, and with the Centre for Finance and Credit Markets at the University of Nottingham.
Notable publications by Mr. Kuttner’s include: “What Explains the Stock Market’s Reaction to Federal Reserve Policy (with Ben Bernanke), Journal of Finance (2005); “The Great Recession: Lessons for Macroeconomic Policy from Japan” (with Adam Posen), Brookings Papers on Economic Activity (2001); “Monetary Policy Surprises and Interest Rates: Evidence from the Fed funds Futures Market,” Journal of Monetary Economics (2001); and “Are There Bank Effects in Borrowers’ Cost of Funds? Evidence from a Matched Sample of Borrowers and Banks” (with Glenn Hubbard and Darius Palia), Journal of Business (2002). His work has also appeared in the American Economic Review, Journal of Business and Economic Statistics, Review of Economics and Statistics, Journal of Regional Science, Journal of Futures Markets, Journal of Econometrics, North American Journal of Economics and Finance, and International Journal of Finance and Economics. Mr. Kuttner currently serves as an associate editor of the Journal of Money, Credit and Banking.
Prior to joining the Williams faculty, Mr. Kuttner was the Danforth-Lewis Professor of Economics at Oberlin College. He has held nonacademic positions as Assistant Vice President in the research departments of the Federal Reserve Banks of New York and Chicago, where he specialized in the analysis of monetary policy issues. Mr. Kuttner’s other academic experience includes positions as a visiting professor at Columbia Business School, the New Economic School in Moscow, and the University of Wisconsin at Madison. He has also served as an adjunct professor at New York University, Columbia Business School, the Graduate School of Business at the University of Chicago, and DePaul University. He earned his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1989, and an A.B. degree from the University of California at Berkeley in 1982.
