People

Professor Finn E. Kydland is the Jeffrey Henley Professor of Economics and 2004 Nobel Laureate in Economic Sciences. Professor Kydland received his B.A. from the Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration, and his Ph.D. in Economics from Carnegie Mellon University. He joined the UCSB faculty in 2004, after previous appointments at Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Texas at Austin, and the Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration. He is a Research Associate for the Federal Reserve Banks of Dallas and St. Louis, and a Senior Research Fellow at the IC2 Institute at the University of Texas at Austin. He is an Adjunct Professor at the Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration, and has held visiting scholar and professor positions at, among other places, the Hoover Institution and the Universidad Torcuato di Tella in Buenos Aires, Argentina. He was elected a Fellow of the Econometric Society in 1992.

Professor Kydland was awarded the 2004 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences jointly with Professor Edward C. Prescott of Arizona State University. Professors Kydland and Prescott received the Nobel Prize for their research on business cycles and macroeconomic policy, specifically, the driving forces behind business cycles and the time consistency of economic policy. More recently, Professor Kydland has conducted research on the role of monetary policy for the business cycle. Moreover, he has studied Ireland and Argentina with the idea in mind that there is a lot for other nations' policy-makers to learn from the respective successes and failures of these two nations.

Peter Rupert is a Professor of Economics at UCSB, he joined the department in 2007 from the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland where he was a Senior Research Advisor. His areas of interest include macroeconomics, monetary economics, labor, crime, housing and anything else that needs to be fixed. Peter helps identify important questions and facilitates bringing together researchers from around the world to attend LAEF conferences and shed light on the answers.

Nick Pretnar is the Assistant Director of LAEF. He is involved in organizing academic workshops and conferences across all disciplines of macroeconomics in order to bring together diverse groups of researchers to discuss questions and problems at the frontier of economics. Since graduating with his PhD from Carnegie Mellon University in 2020, he has been involved with helping organize over 15 LAEF conferences. His research interests include growth and development, particularly as these topics relate to structural transformation, how consumers spend their off-market time, and questions at the frontier of understanding whether consumers behave according to traditional definitions of rationality.

He is currently an Adjunct Professor at the Tepper School of Business, Carnegie Mellon University, and the Simon Business School, University of Rochester.