Economist Jeremy Stein to Deliver Winter Lecture on April 13

Jeremy C. Stein, Moise Y. Safra Professor of Economics at Harvard University, will deliver the 2014–15 Judge Ralph K. Winter Lecture on Corporate Law and Governance on April 13, 2015, at 4:30 pm in the Faculty Lounge.

In his lecture, titled “The Federal Reserve’s Balance Sheet and Its Financial Stability Objectives,” Stein will discuss how the Fed’s management of its balance sheet has implications not only for the conduct of monetary policy but also for financial stability. As a result of the financial crisis, new regulations have been put into place to limit maturity transformation, “i.e., too much funding of long-term assets with short-term borrowing,” Stein says. But he believes that maturity transformation has incentives that have been overlooked.

“One way for the government to mitigate the problem, and to take some of the burden off of regulation, is by being more willing to supply safe short-term claims,” says Stein. “The Fed’s reverse repurchase (RRP) facility represents one promising method for doing so, and as such can be seen as a financial-stability tool in addition to a device for simply implementing interest-rate changes.”

Stein teaches courses in the undergraduate and PhD programs of Harvard University. From May 2012 to May 2014, he was a member of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System.

Before coming to Harvard in 2000, Stein was on the finance faculty of M.I.T.’s Sloan School of Management. Prior to that, he was an assistant professor of finance at the Harvard Business School. He received his A.B. in economics from Princeton University and his Ph.D. in economics from M.I.T.

Stein’s research has covered such topics as behavioral finance and market efficiency, corporate investment and financing decisions, risk management, capital allocation inside firms, banking, financial regulation, and monetary policy. He has been a co-editor of the Quarterly Journal of Economics, and the Journal of Economic Perspectives, and on the editorial boards of several other economics and finance journals.

The Winter Lecture is sponsored by the Dean’s Office and the Yale Law School Center for the Study of Corporate Law. The Judge Ralph K. Winter Lectureship on Corporate Law and Governance was established by former law clerks and students of Judge Winter to support lectures on corporate law and governance and related topics.