INTERNATIONAL FINANCE AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT
Strengthening Economies, Strengthening Futures
The reach of SIPA scholars and alumni is deep and broad, extending to all facets of the modern global economy and individual national economies — macroeconomic policy, labor, global trade, capital markets, monetary policy, and financial regulations — as well as the challenges of successful and thoughtful economic development.
Faculty and Research —
Bringing Expertise to Economic Policies Worldwide
Takatoshi Ito
Jacob Lew
Patricia C. Mosser
Under Dean Janow’s leadership, SIPA emphasized the issue of central banking and financial policy like never before — establishing a new initiative and a new degree track, and supporting key research and programs — and recruited remarkable faculty to enhance SIPA’s expertise in international finance and other essential areas.
Economist Takatoshi Ito, the onetime dean of the University of Tokyo’s Graduate School of Public Policy and a former senior official in the Japanese government, joined SIPA as a professor of international and public affairs in January 2015. Ito also serves as associate director for research at Columbia Business School‘s Center on Japanese Economy and Business. An expert on international finance, macroeconomics, and the Japanese economy, Ito served from 2006 to 2008 as a member of the Prime Minister’s Council on Economic and Fiscal Policy. He also held senior positions in the Japanese Ministry of Finance and at the International Monetary Fund. Ito’s research has examined capital flows and currency crises, microstructures of foreign exchange rates, and inflation targeting.
The former U.S. treasury secretary Jacob Lew joined SIPA as a visiting professor in February 2017, shortly after leaving the Obama administration. He continues to lecture, teach graduate students, and work with faculty members at the school and across the University on the subjects of international economics, fiscal and trade policy, and a range of other public policy issues. Lew became secretary in 2013, taking office as the U.S. economy was struggling to regain its footing after the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. He helped lead the U.S. economy to a foundation of economic growth and declining unemployment. Before he became secretary, Lew was White House chief of staff. He has also been director of the Office of Management and Budget, a managing director and chief operating officer at Citigroup, and executive vice president and chief operating officer of New York University.
Patricia C. Mosser, a veteran senior official at U.S. Treasury and Federal Reserve Bank of New York, joined the School in 2015 as a senior research scholar and the founding director of the Central Banking and Financial Policy Initiative, which embraces central banking, monetary policy, global finance and prudential practice. The initiative continues to brings together scholars, researchers, practitioners and central bankers from around the world in a unique collaborative effort to shed new light on how central banks and policy institutions can improve the functioning and stability of the global financial system. The program hosted the 2019 annual meeting of the Central Bank Research Association, one of many collaborations with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Other recent highlights include the webinar series Central Banking in the COVID-19 Era.
In 2018 Mosser also assumed leadership of SIPA’s MPA program in Economic Policy Management.
Richard N. Gardner
Professorship
Jan Svejnar
The late Richard N. Gardner was a distinguished diplomat, former U.S. ambassador, and longtime Columbia faculty member. Teaching and diplomacy in the areas of international trade and economic policy were his life’s work. In 2020 SIPA established a faculty chair in Gardner’s honor, and in 2021 Columbia’s Trustees approved the appointment of Professor Jan Svejnar as the inaugural holder of the new Richard N. Gardner Professorship.
Svejnar joined SIPA in 2012 as the James T. Shotwell Professor of Global Political Economy and director of SIPA’s Center on Global Economic Governance (CGEG). As the Richard Gardner Professor, he will continue his leadership of CGEG and his ongoing research and teaching on the effects of foreign investment and government policies on firms, labor, and capital markets; corporate, national, and global governance and performance; as well as a broader focus on the international system and its operation.
Central Bankers
Richard Clarida
José Antonio Ocampo
In 2018, SIPA professor Richard Clarida took public-service leave to become vice chairman of the Federal Reserve System. Prior to his appointment, Clarida was the C. Lowell Harriss Professor of Economics and International Affairs at Columbia University, where he began teaching in 1988. Clarida had previously served as the assistant secretary of the treasury for economic policy from February 2002 until May 2003 under President George W. Bush, and on the Council of Economic Advisers under President Reagan.
Another SIPA professor, José Antonio Ocampo, served on the board of Colombia’s Banco de la República, that country’s central bank, from 2017 to 2020. Before he joined SIPA’s faculty in 2007, Ocampo had worked in several high-profile positions for the United Nations—including as under secretary general for economic and social affairs—and in his home nation of Colombia, where he led the ministries of finance, planning, and agriculture.