A conversation between Princeton professor Atif Mian and Dr. Reza Baqir, former Governor, State Bank of Pakistan and Senior Fellow, Harvard University.
Speaker Biographies:
Dr. Reza Baqir served as the 20th governor of Pakistan’s central bank, the State Bank of Pakistan, from May 2019 to May 2022. He is currently a senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School and managing director and global practice leader for sovereign advisory services at Alvarez and Marsal. During his time as governor, Dr. Baqir negotiated a new IMF program in 2019, successfully completed six subsequent reviews to restore financial stability and growth, and led the country’s financial response during the Covid-19 pandemic. He led several institutional reforms including the liberalization of Pakistan’s foreign exchange market from a fixed to a flexible regime, revision of the central bank law to strengthen its independence, Roshan Digital Accounts for overseas Pakistanis, and several digitization initiatives to promote efficiency and inclusion in the financial sector. Previously Dr. Baqir spent nineteen years with the IMF and two with the World Bank where he held numerous senior policy and country positions in East Asia, Middle East, and Europe. He started and headed the IMF’s office in Egypt as Senior Resident Representative and headed the IMF's Debt Policy Division which oversees IMF’s work on assessing debt sustainability and sovereign debt restructuring. Dr. Baqir resigned from the IMF for public service in his home country. Dr. Baqir’s research has been published in the Journal of Political Economy and the Quarterly Journal of Economics, amongst other journals. He holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of California at Berkeley and an A.B. (Magna cum Laude) in Economics from Harvard University. His views on emerging markets’ economic challenges and sovereign debt have been covered frequently in the Financial Times, Bloomberg, Reuters, CNN, and CNBC.
Atif Mian is John H. Laporte, Jr. Class of 1967 Professor of Economics, Public Policy and Finance at Princeton University, and Director of the Julis-Rabinowitz Center for Public Policy and Finance at the Woodrow Wilson School. He holds a bachelors degree in Mathematics with Computer Science and Ph.D. in Economics from MIT. Prior to joining Princeton in 2012 he taught at the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Chicago Booth School of business. Professor Mian's work studies the connections between finance and the macro economy. His latest book, House of Debt, with Amir Sufi builds upon powerful new data to describe how debt precipitated the Great Recession. The book explains why debt continues to threaten the global economy, and what needs to be done to fix the financial system. House of Debt is critically acclaimed by The New York Times, Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal,The Economist, and The Atlantic among others. Professor Mian's research has appeared in top academic journals, including the American Economic Review, Econometrica, Quarterly Journal of Economics, Journal of Finance, Review of Financial Studies and Journal of Financial Economics.
25 апр 2023
