The Business, Economic, and Financial History Project

Jesús Fernández-Villaverde is Howard Marks Presidential Professor of Economics at the University of Pennsylvania, where he serves as Director of the Penn Initiative for the Study of Markets, Visiting Professor at University of Oxford, Visiting Fellow at Nuffield College (Oxford), Visiting Scholar at the Federal Reserve Banks of Chicago, New York, and Philadelphia and the Bank of Spain, and a member of the National Bureau of Economic Research and the Center for Economic Policy Research. In the past, he has hold academic appointments, among others, at Harvard University, Princeton University, Yale University, Duke University, and New York University, he has been Visiting Scholar at the Federal Reserve Banks of St. Louis, Minneapolis, Cleveland, and Atlanta, Research Professor at FEDEA (Spain), National Fellow of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, Visiting Scholar at the Becker-Friedman Institute of the University of Chicago, Visiting Scholar at INET at University of Cambridge, Distinguished Visiting Professor at University of Melbourne (Australia), and he was the director of the Penn Institute for Economic Research. He is editor of the International Economic Review. In the past, he has served in the editorial board of several other learned journals.  He has published over several dozen peer-reviewed papers, including American Economic Review, Econometrica, and Review of Economic Studies and edited and co-authored several books. His research focuses on macroeconomics, econometrics, and economic history.

His website is available here.

Marc Flandreau is Professor of Economic History at the University of Pennsylvania. A world-renown historian of finance Flandreau is a leader in the quantitative history of monetary regimes, exchange rates, financial crises, central banks, rating agencies and sovereign debt. Before joining Penn as Howard S. Marks Professor of Economic History, Flandreau was Chair of International Finance at Sciences Po, Paris, and a Professor of Economics and History at the Graduate Institute of International Studies and Development in Geneva. His academic background doubles up with real-world expertise. He has worked extensively with central banks and international organizations and was chief economist with Lehman Brothers France (2002-2008). He is currently member of the Policy Panel of the Bank of International Settlements and advises the BIS macro-historical data project, Historical Monetary and Financial Statistics. He has published many articles and authored several books including The Glitter of Gold: France, Bimetallism and the Emergence of the International Gold Standard; Money Doctors, The Experience of International Financial Advising 1850-2000; The Gold Standard in Theory and History (with Barry Eichengreen);  Making of Global Finance 1880-1913 (with Frédéric Zumer)

His website is available here.

Max Harris is Senior Fellow at the Wharton Initiative on Financial Policy and Regulation. Prior to joining Wharton, he worked at the U.S. Department of the Treasury on European macroeconomic issues. In addition, he helped design and implement coronavirus relief programs at Treasury. He has also worked as a policy consultant to former Director of the National Economic Council Gene Sperling and as a policy adviser on Pete Buttigieg’s presidential campaign. His research focuses on international monetary history, and he is the author of the book Monetary War and Peace: London, Washington, Paris, and the Tripartite Agreement of 1936 (Cambridge University Press 2021). He holds a PhD in economics from Harvard University.

His website is available here.

Nicole Adrian is a doctoral student in the Penn History Department studying environmental history with a focus on agriculture. She is interested in twentieth century U.S. farm finance, the development of corporate agribusiness, and their influences in the policymaking process. Prior to Penn, Nicole studied history, environmental studies, conservation biology, and public policy at the University of Wisconsin – Madison.

Arielle Xena Alterwaite is a PhD candidate in the History Department where she studies histories of political-economy and empire. She is interested in the intersections of abolition, finance, and sovereignty and is currently working on an international history of Haitian sovereign debt in the first half of the nineteenth century. Her writing has appeared in The American Historical Review, Slavery & Abolition, and the Los Angeles Review of Books.