The HOPE Center is pleased to welcome the following scholars as HOPE Center fellows for the 2013–14 academic year.
Jeff Biddle is a professor of economics at Michigan State University. His research on the history of economic thought has mainly been concerned with the American economics profession in the twentieth century, most recently with the history of the application of empirical methods in economics. While at the HOPE Center he hopes to complete his book on the development and diffusion of the Cobb-Douglas regression as a research tool in economics.
Robert W. Dimand is a professor of economics at Brock University, St. Catherine's, Ontario, and an adjunct professor of economics at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. He is the author of The Origins of the Keynesian Revolution (1988) and coauthor of volume 1 of A History of Game Theory (1996). He has edited or coedited a dozen books, most recently an International Economic Association conference volume, Keynes's General Theory after Seventy Years (2010). His journal articles have investigated the history of macroeconomics, the early history of game theory, and the history of women in economics. In 2012–13 he was president of the History of Economics Society.
Alex Gill is a PhD student in the Department of Economics at North Carolina State University, where he teaches an undergraduate course on the history of economic thought. His dissertation develops the theory of loan securitization and analyzes its properties as a method of financial intermediation in the presence of a central bank and other modern credit market institutions. As a HOPE fellow, Alex will continue an investigation into the evolution of modern monetary policy theory he began with his working paper "Ben Bernanke: Theory and Practice." The broader project focuses on the "great moderation" generation of macroeconomists and attempts to further understanding of monetary policy responses to the financial crisis.
Matthias Klaes is a professor of history and philosophy of economics at the University of Dundee, having previously held the chair of commerce at Keele University since 2005. He is an expert on historical semantics in economics and specializes in twentieth-century history of economics, especially the semantic development of key concepts such as transaction costs or bounded rationality. He will come to the HOPE Center as an international fellow of the UK-based Leverhulme Trust, working on developing online collections of materials related to the history of economics.
Kyu Sang Lee researches historical and philosophical issues about postwar economics, in particular, experimental economics, behavioral economics, and mechanism design theory. Recent publications include "Three Ways of Linking Laboratory Endeavours to the Realm of Policies" (European Journal of the History of Economic Thought) and "Looking for a 'Big Picture': Vernon Smith's Evolutionary Interpretation of Economic Phenomena and What (Experimental) Economists Do" (in Korean; Review of Social Economy). As a HOPE Center fellow, he will work on historical themes in the development of experimental economics and of the study of social preferences. Kyu is an associate professor of economics at Ajou University.
Scott Sheall's research interests are focused primarily on the relationship between economic science, methodology, and public policy. He recently completed a dissertation in philosophy at Arizona State University that addressed certain epistemological issues raised in the famous debate between Friedrich Hayek and John Maynard Keynes. As a HOPE Center fellow, Scott plans to complete a project on the role that considerations of human ignorance played in Hayek's work in both economics and philosophy. He also hopes to begin a project on the mathematician Karl Menger, the only son of Carl Menger, founder of the Austrian school of economics. The papers of both Mengers are held at Duke in the Economists' Papers Project.
Gerardo Serra is a PhD student in the Department of Economic History at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His thesis attempts to analyze the evolution of economics and statistics in colonial and postcolonial Africa and their relation to state-building and policymaking. His research interests include the history and methodology of economics, colonial and postcolonial African economic history, and the intellectual history of statistics and economic planning in developing countries. While at the HOPE Center, Gerardo will explore the papers of Bruno Foa, an Italian economist who, among other things, provided technical assistance to Somalia on the eve of independence.