Speakers

Professor Roger Myerson is the Glen A. Lloyd Distinguished Service Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago, shared the 2007 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his contribution to the foundations of mechanism design theory. Myerson taught for 25 years at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University before moving to the University of Chicago in 2001. He is the author of two books (Game Theory and Probability Models for Economic Decisions), and has published many professional articles on game theory, information economics and economic analysis of political institutions. His work has been influential in economics and political science. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and has served as its Midwest vice president. He was elected president of the Econometric Society in 2008. Myerson received a Ph.D. from Harvard University.

Kevin Murphy is the first professor at a business school to be chosen as a MacArthur Fellow in the 25 years that the awards have been given. He was selected for "revealing economic forces shaping vital social phenomena such as wage inequality, unemployment, addiction, medical research, and economic growth." The foundation felt his work "challenges preconceived notions and attacks seemingly intractable economic questions, placing them on sound empirical and theoretical footing." He primarily studies inequality, unemployment, and relative wages, as well as the economics of growth and development and the economic value of improvements in health and longevity. In 2007, Murphy and fellow Chicago Booth faculty member Robert Topel won the Kenneth J. Arrow Award for the best research paper in health economics for "The Value of Health and Longevity," published in the Journal of Political Economy. Murphy is the author of two books, several academic articles, and published in numerous mainstream publications including the Boston Globe, the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, and two Wall Street Journal article coauthored by Nobel Laureate Gary Becker. He has a PhD in 1986 from the University of Chicago, and a bachelor's degree from the University of California at Los Angeles in 1981. He joined the Chicago Booth faculty in 1984.

Marianne Bertrand is an applied microeconomist who has done work on racial discrimination, CEO pay and incentives, and the effects of regulation on employment, among other topics in labor economics and corporate finance. Her research in these areas has been published widely. She is the recipient of the 2004 Elaine Bennett Research Prize, awarded by the American Economics Association's Committee on the Status of Women in the economics profession. The prize recognizes and honors outstanding research in any field of economics by a woman at the beginning of her career. She also is the recipient of an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship in 2003. Bertrand taught at Princeton University for two years before joining Chicago Booth in 2000. She is currently a research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research, the Center for Economics Policy Research, and the Institute for the Study of Labor. Besides teaching and publishing, Bertrand also has served a coeditor of the Economic Journal and as associate editor of multiple journals. She received a bachelor's degree in economics from Belgium's Universit Libre de Bruxelles in 1991, followed by a master's degree in econometrics from the same institution the next year. She moved to the United State in 1993 and earned a PhD in economics from Harvard University in 1998.

Professor Gary Becker, recipient of the 1992 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, is the University Professor of Economics and Sociology at the University of Chicago. He is also a professor at the university's Booth School of Business and the Rose-Marie and Jack R. Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institute. He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2007, the National Medal of Science in 2000, the John Bates Clark Medal of the American Economic Association in 1967 and many other awards. The author of numerous books and professional articles, Becker was a featured monthly columnist for BusinessWeek for almost 20 years. He is recognized for his expertise in human capital, economic incentives, economics of the family, and economic analysis of crime, discrimination and population. Becker taught at Columbia University for 12 years before returning to the University of Chicago, where he earned his Ph.D.

Farrukh Iqbal is Director of the Strategic Cooperation Group in the Middle East and North Africa region of the World Bank that is responsible for relations with the GCC group of countries and with regional development finance institutions such as the various Arab Funds and the Islamic Development Bank.
He has more than twenty five years of experience in the World Bank across a diverse range of countries and sectors. He is the author of several books and published articles on various aspects of economic development including growth strategies, poverty, small and medium enterprises, trade and foreign investment reforms, local government development, and political economy issues. He has a bachelor’s degree from Harvard University and a Ph. D. in economics from Yale University.

Matthew W. Stolper (Professor of Assyriology, John A. Wilson Professor of Oriental Studies in the Oriental Institute) has worked primarily on Achaemenid Babylonian texts and secondarily on Elamite history and texts. His work on Babylonia when it was a province of the Achaemenid Persian empire mostly treats legal and administrative texts as evidence of social, economic and political history c. 450-300 B.C., the time between the consolidation of Achaemenid control and the consolidation of Seleucid control. His work on Elam and Elamite includes a survey of Elamite political history (out of print), a sketch of Elamite grammar, and publication of Proto-Elamite and Elamite texts from ancient Anshan. His main effort now is on Achaemenid Elamite and Achaemenid Aramaic administrative excavated by the Oriental Institute in 1933 at Persepolis, the imperial residence in the Persian homeland to be published in electronic and conventional forms. Stolper's courses have dealt mostly with Akkadian historical and legal texts of the late first millennium, with forays into Old Persian and Elamite language and Achaemenid history. He serves on the editorial boards of the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary, the Journal of Cuneiform Studies, and ARTA.