Topic: Political Economy

Nouriel Roubini

Nouriel Roubini is CEO of Roubini Macro Associates, LLC, a global macroeconomic consultancy firm in New York. He is also Chief Economist for Atlas Capital Team LP, as well as Co-Founder of Rosa & Roubini Associates. At a 2006 address to the International Monetary Fund, Roubini warned of the impending recession due to the credit and housing market bubble. His predictions of these upside-down balance sheets became a reality in 2008, with the bubble bursting and reverberating around the world into a global financial crisis lasting well into the next decade.

Dr. Roubini has extensive policy experience as well as broad academic credentials. He served as a professor of economics at New York University’s Stern School of Business from 1995 to 2021.

He was Co- Founder and Chairman of Roubini Global Economics from 2005 to 2016 – a firm whose website was named one of the best economics web resources by BusinessWeek, Forbes, the Wall Street Journal and the Economist. From 1998 to 2000, he served as the senior economist for international affairs on the White House Council of Economic Advisors and then the senior advisor to the undersecretary for international affairs at the U.S. Treasury Department, helping to resolve the Asian and global financial crises, among other issues. The International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and numerous other prominent public and private institutions have drawn upon his consulting expertise.

He has published numerous theoretical, empirical and policy papers on international macroeconomic issues and coauthored the books Political Cycles: Theory and Evidence (MIT Press, 1997) and Bailouts or Bail-ins? Responding to Financial Crises

in Emerging Markets (Institute for International Economics, 2004) and Crisis Economics: A Crash Course in the Future of Finance (Penguin Press, 2010). Dr. Roubini’s views on global economic issues are widely cited by the media, and he is a frequent commentator on various business news programs. He has been the subject of extended profiles in the New York Times Magazine, The Financial Times, among other leading current-affairs publications. He is published monthly as a columnist with Project Syndicate.

Dr. Roubini received an undergraduate degree at Bocconi University in Milan, Italy, and a doctorate in economics at Harvard University. Prior to joining Stern, he was on the faculty of Yale University’s department of economics.

Yasheng Huang

Yasheng Huang is an associate professor in the area of international management at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He joined MIT in 2003. His previous appointments include assistant professor at the University of Michigan, associate professor at Harvard University, and consultant to the World Bank.

Professor Huang’s research focuses on international business, political economy, and institutional issues. His published book, Selling China (Cambridge University Press, 2003) examines the institutional drivers of foreign direct investment (FDI) in China.

Unlike many other studies of FDI in China, this book shows that some of the inefficiencies of China’s financial and legal institutions have served to drive up FDI inflows. The principal effect of these inefficiencies is a lowering of the average level of competitiveness of domestic firms, which creates a number of propitious conditions for foreign firms.

Huang is the author of Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics, a history of economic reforms in China chronicles three decades of economic reform in China and documents the critical role that private entrepreneurship played in the Communist nation’s “economic miracle.”

Professor Huang is extending this way of looking at FDI-examining the competitiveness of domestic firms-to other countries by analyzing the institutional environment for local firms and entrepreneurship.