IMF Fellowship Program
New IMF Fellows Announced
Washington DC, April 12, 2012
![IMF Fellowship Program](/external/images/fellowship1.jpg)
The IMF has announced the selection of three IMF Fellows under a new program to further policy-relevant research of interest to the international financial community.
Chosen through a competitive process that attracted over 400 applicants, the Fellows are:
- Olivier Coibion, Assistant Professor, College of William & Mary
- Chris Erceg, Associate Director, International Finance Division, Federal Reserve Board
- Sebnem Kalemli-Ozcan, Professor of Economics, University of Houston
![]() Olivier Coibion |
![]() Chris Erceg |
![]() Sebnem Kalemli-Ozcan |
The Fellows will be at the IMF during the 2012-13 academic year, working on mutually agreed topics that are relevant to the work of the IMF. While hosted by the Research Department, Fellows will also be expected to interact actively with staff in other departments of the IMF.
The Fellowship program is aimed at attracting economists with a substantial research record in leading journals and a strong interest in the policy-relevant work conducted at the IMF.
Olivier Blanchard, the IMF's Economic Counsellor and Director of Research, said that the fellows bring "a wealth of research expertise and policy experience that covers the spectrum of topics of interest to the Fund-monetary and fiscal policy, real-financial linkages, large scale-modeling of the global economy, and economic development. I look forward to having them at the IMF."
Bios of IMF Fellows:
Olivier Coibion is Assistant Professor of Economics at the College of William and Mary, a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), an Associate Editor of the Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, and a member of Oxford Economics' expert panel on global economic conditions. Coibion has also worked at the Council of Economic Advisers and the Brookings Institution. After his fellowship at the IMF, he will join the University of Texas—Austin as an Assistant Professor of Economics. Coibion holds a Ph.D in economics from the University of Michigan.
Coibion’s research has been published in leading economics journals such as the American Economic Review, the Journal of Political Economy and the Review of Economic Studies. While a Fellow at the IMF, Coibion will conduct research on the historical relationship between economic inequality and monetary policy in the U.S.; the optimal use of monetary and fiscal policy in models with heterogeneous agents; and the links between commodity markets, futures prices and the real economy.
Christopher Erceg is an Associate Director in the International Finance Division of the Federal Reserve Board. He joined the Board after receiving his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Chicago.
Erceg played a major role in initiating and developing the Board’s open economy DSGE model (SIGMA), and in leading efforts to apply the model to policy questions. In his research, Erceg has made important contributions to the literature on optimal monetary policy, and to assessing the channels through which monetary policy affects the economy. He has also published papers on an array of open economy topics, ranging from commodity price behavior to key determinants of the trade balance.
In addition to continuing to work on some these topics, Erceg plans to devote part of his time at the IMF on fiscal policy issues, including on the effects of fiscal adjustment when monetary policy is at the zero lower bound. Erceg’s research has been published in leading economics journals, including the American Economic Review, the Journal of Monetary Economics, the Journal of International Economics and the Journal of the European Economic Association.
Sebnem Kalemli-Ozcan is a Visiting Professor of Public Policy at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), a Research Fellow at the Center for Economic Policy Research (CEPR) and an associate editor of the Journal of Development Economics. She is the Endowed Professor of Economics at the University of Houston since 2010, and a Visiting Professor of Economics and Finance at Koc University in Turkey since 2011. She will join the University of Maryland, College Park as a full professor later this year.
Kalemli-Ozcan was the Duisenberg Fellow at the European Central Bank in Spring 2008. She has also served as the lead economist/advisor for the Middle East and North Africa Region at the World Bank during 2010-2011. A native of Turkey, Kalemli-Ozcan received her PhD in Economics from Brown University. She is the first Turkish recipient of Marie Curie fellowship (reintegration grant to reverse brain drain) from the European Council in Social Sciences.
Kalemli-Ozcan has published extensively in the areas of international finance, international development and growth theory in leading journals such as American Economic Review, Journal of Finance, and Review of Economics and Statistics. At the IMF, she will pursue research on the linkages between real and financial sectors in a globalized economy and the effects of such linkages on economic fluctuations and development.