CEICS, Campus of International excellence southern catalonia Coordinated by URV · Rovira i Virgili University

Finn Kydland is the Jeffrey Henley Professor of Economics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and 2004 Nobel Laureate in Economic Sciences.  Professor Kydland received his B.A. from the Norwegian School of Economics (abbreviated NHH in Norwegian), and his Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University (CMU).  After previous appointments at NHH, CMU, and the University of Texas at Austin, he joined the UCSB faculty in 2004, where he is also the director of the Laboratory for Aggregate Economics and Finance. He is an Adjunct Professor at CMU, NHH, and University of Stavanger, and a Research Associate for the Federal Reserve Banks of Dallas and St. Louis. He was elected a Fellow of the Econometric Society in 1992.

Professor Kydland was awarded the Nobel Prize jointly with Professor Edward Prescott of Arizona State University.  Professors Kydland and Prescott received the Nobel Prize for their research on business cycles and macroeconomic policy, specifically, the driving forces behind business cycles and the time inconsistency of economic policy.  More recently, Professor Kydland has conducted research on the role of monetary policy in the aggregate economy, domestically as well as internationally.  For example, why have nominal variables, such as the aggregate price level and nominal interest rates, been much more synchronized, cyclically, across major nations than real aggregates, such as real GDP? In the housing arena, empirically residential investment leads the cycle significantly in some nations, but not in others. How is this regularity related to the nature of mortgage contracts in the respective countries, in particular to the relative prevalence of fixed versus flexible nominal interest rates? What role does monetary policy play in this regard? Finally, Professor Kydland has studied Ireland and Argentina with the idea in mind that there is a lot for other nations’ policymakers to learn from the respective successes and failures of these two nations.