The Euro in Crisis

John H. Cochrane is the AQR Capital Management Professor of Finance at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. His recent finance publications include the book Asset Pricing and articles on dynamics in stock and bond markets, the volatility of exchange rates, the term structure of interest rates, the returns to venture capital, liquidity premiums in stock prices, the relation between stock prices and business cycles, and option pricing when investors can’t perfectly hedge. His monetary economics publications include articles on the effects of monetary policy and the fiscal theory of the price level. He has also written articles on macroeconomics, health insurance, and other topics.

Cochrane is president-elect of the American Finance Association, a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research and past director of its asset pricing program, a fellow of the Econometric Society, and an adjunct scholar of the CATO Institute. He has been an editor of the Journal of Political Economy and associate editor of several journals including the Journal of Monetary Economics, Journal of Business, and Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control. Recent awards include the TIAA-CREF Institute Paul A. Samuelson Award for his book Asset Pricing, the Chookaszian Endowed Risk Management Prize, and the Faculty Excellence Award for MBA teaching.

Cochrane earned a bachelor’s degree in physics at MIT and earned his PhD in economics at the University of California at Berkeley. He was in the Economics Department of the University of Chicago before joining Chicago Booth in 1994 and visited UCLA Anderson School of Management from 2000 to 2001.

Luigi Zingales studies the theory of the firm, the relation between organization and financing, and the going-public decision. In addition to holding his position at Chicago Booth, Zingales is currently a faculty research fellow for the National Bureau of Economic Research, a research fellow for the Center for Economic Policy Research, and a fellow of the European Governance Institute. He is also the director of the American Finance Association and an editorialist for Il Sole 24 Ore, the Italian correspondent of the Financial Times. Zingales also serves on the Committee on Capital Markets Regulation, which has been examining the legislative, regulatory, and legal issues affecting how public companies function.

His research has earned him the 2003 Bernacer Prize for the best European young financial economist, the 2002 Nasdaq award for best paper in capital formation, and a National Science Foundation Grant in economics. His work has been published in the Journal of Financial Economics, the Journal of Finance, and the American Economic Review.

His book, Saving Capitalism from the Capitalists, coauthored with Raghuram G. Rajan, has been acclaimed as “one of the most powerful defenses of the free market ever written” by Bruce Bartlett of National Review Online. Martin Wolf of the Financial Times called it “an important book.”

Born in Italy, a country with high inflation and unemployment that has inspired his professional interests as an economist, Zingales carries with him a political passion and the belief that economists should not just interpret the world, they should change it for the better. Commenting on his method of teaching on a few very important lessons rather than a myriad of details, Zingales says, “Twenty years from now they might have forgotten all the details of my course, but hopefully they will not have forgotten the way of thinking.”

Zingales received a bachelor’s degree in economics summa cum laude from Universita Bocconi in Italy in 1987 and a PhD in economics from MIT in 1992. He joined the Chicago Booth faculty in 1992.