Fed chief Janet Yellen to speak at SIEPR

Janet Yellen, chair of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, will discuss “The Economic Outlook and Conduct of Monetary Policy” at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research on Jan. 19.

The event is by invitation only and will be webcast live.

“It is an honor to host Janet Yellen at SIEPR,” said Mark Duggan, the Trione Director of SIEPR and the Wayne and Jodi Cooperman Professor of Economics. “As someone who began her career as a scholar and became one of the country’s most important and influential policymakers, she represents the strong and important connection between academia and economic policy.”

Yellen took office as vice chair of the Fed’s Board of Governors in 2010, and was appointed to a four-year term as chair in 2014. She is professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, where she was the Eugene E. and Catherine M. Trefethen Professor of Business and professor of economics.

Yellen took leave from Berkeley for five years starting in August 1994. She served as a member of the Fed’s Board of Governors through February 1997, and then left the Fed to become chair of the Council of Economic Advisers through August 1999. She also chaired the Economic Policy Committee of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development from 1997 to 1999 and was chief of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco from 2004 to 2010.

Yellen graduated from Brown University with a degree in economics in 1967, and received her Ph.D. in Economics from Yale University in 1971. An assistant professor at Harvard University from 1971 to 1976, Yellen served as an economist with the Fed's Board of Governors in 1977 and 1978. She was on the faculty of the London School of Economics and Political Science from 1978 to 1980.

She has written on a wide variety of macroeconomic issues, while specializing in the causes, mechanisms, and implications of unemployment.