Janice Eberly

James R. and Helen D. Russell Professor of Finance. Macroeconomist specializing in investment and spending decisions of households and businesses. Her interest in theoretically sound and empirically motivated economic policy recently culminated in her nomination and confirmation as Assistant Secretary for Economic Policy and Chief Economist of the U.S. Department of Treasury. Beginning with her Journal of Political Economy article on consumer durables in 1994, her research focused on investment-related issues. Her 1994 paper with Andrew Abel, Unified Theory of Investment under Uncertainty, in American Economic Review provided the conceptual link between traditional Tobin's Q models and those with fixed costs and irreversibility. Her recent work has considered the effect on college choices and human capital of risk arising from income uncertainty, completion risk, and debt financing. She extended her work on households, examining optimal portfolios with elements of both state- and time-dependent adjustment. She served on the executive committee of the American Economic Association and on the advisory boards of the Congressional Budget Office and the Bureau of Economic Analysis. She is now editor of the Brookings Papers on Economic Activity. Recipient, Sloan Foundation Research Fellowship.