James M. Poterba

James Michael "Jim" Poterba ( born July 13, 1958) is an American economist and university professor who holds the Mitsui Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His particular research focuses on the impact of taxes on economic decisions of households and firms. He is also the President of the National Bureau of Economic Research and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Econometric Society.

Training

In 1980, Poterba an AB from Harvard College in Economics with the top grade summa cum laude. Thereafter, he moved to England at the Oxford University, his M.Phil in 1982. in Economics and a D.Phil in 1983. awarded in economics.

Professional career

After completing his Ph.D. studies Poterba accepted a position as Assistant Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he was promoted to associate professor in 1986 and full professor in 1988, before 1996, the Mitsui Professor transfer of Economics got. At MIT Poterba had the position of Deputy Dean of the Department of Economics (1996-2006) and the Dean held (2006-2008). In addition, Poterba 1988 taught as a visiting professor of finance at the Graduate Business School of the University of Chicago. Furthermore Poterba is since 2006 a trustee of TIAA -CREF.

Poterbas career is closely associated with the National Bureau of Economic Research ( NBER ): There he worked as Associate Director of the NBER Taxation Research Program (1989-1991 ) and later as director of the NBER Public Economics Research Program ( 1991-2006 ) worked. Poterba 2008 was elected president and CEO of the NBER, which came in the academic world to positive reactions.

In addition, Poterba works as an editor or board member for the economics journals Journal of Wealth Management ( since 1998), the Retirement Income Review ( since 2002), the Journal of Public Economics (since 1995 ) and the National Tax Journal ( since 2007). In the past he was editorially for the RAND Journal of Economics, the Journal of Finance, the Review of Economics and Statistics, Regional Science and Urban Economics and the Journal of Investment Consulting operates.

Research

According to the economics publication database IDEAS Poterba part in the overall ranking to the 1% of the strongest research economists (Rank 42). Even under criteria such as " number of citations " or " number of works " is one Poterba clearly in the top 5 % of the economists included in the database. The most zitierteste Poterbas article is entitled " Investor Diversification and International Equity Markets " (1991) and was co-authored with Kenneth French. In this article, Kenneth and Poterba examine the paradox, why invest in spite of the scientific recognition of the benefits of international portfolio diversification most investors almost all their wealth in domestic assets. To this end, they develop new estimates for the international equity portfolio assets of investors from the United States, Japan and the UK and determine that over 98 % of the equity portfolio of Japanese investors are invested in domestic assets, while the respective percentages for the U.S. at 94 % and for Great Britain are at 82 %. Based on this, the authors use a simple model for investor preferences to show that the current portfolio patterns imply that investors expect significantly higher returns on investments in their home markets than elsewhere. This lack of diversification seems to be more the result of investor preferences because of institutional constraints.

Other important research Poterbas were made on the relationship between demographic structure and the level of public expenditure on education, the effect of federal exchequer institutions and political circumstances on the dynamics of federal taxes and public spending in the debt crisis, speculation in financial and commodity markets, the economic opportunities and risks of an aging society, the influence of transitive components on the variance of stock returns, the impact of news on stock prices, the effect of changing volatility of individual stock prices on the stock market, the expected present value of payments of lifetime annuities or the relationship between the aggregate value of company shares and changes in consumer spending.

Personal

James Poterba is married since 1984 with Nancy Lin rose, with which he had three children - Matthew (1989 ), Timothy (1991) and Margaret (1994 ) - has.