| Nationality | American |
|---|---|
| Institution | Brown University |
| Field | Financial economics Economic development |
| Alma mater | Cornell University (B.A. 1982) UCLA (Ph.D. 1987) |
Ross Levine is an American economist and the James and Merryl Tisch Professor of Economics at Brown University. He is also director of the William R. Rhodes Center for International Economics & Finance at Brown's Watson Institute for International Studies.
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He received his bachelor's degree from Cornell University in 1982, graduating Phi Beta Kappa. He completed his Ph.D. at UCLA in 1987.[1]
Upon completion of his doctorate, he began work as an economist for the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. From 1990 to 1997, he was a principal economist at The World Bank.
He became an associate professor at the University of Virginia in 1997 and was granted tenure two years later. From 1999 to 2005, he was the Curtis L. Carlson Professor of Finance at the University of Minnesota.
In 2005, he was hired by the Department of Economics at Brown University, where he teaches an undergraduate course on financial institutions.
In February 2010, he debated the merits of financial innovation with Joseph Stiglitz, the 2001 recipient of the Nobel Prize in Economics, in an online series for The Economist.[2]
He remains a consultant to the United States Treasury, Federal Reserve System, and the International Monetary Fund.[3]
Levine specializes in international finance, banking regulation, and economic development. Specifically, his research focuses on the links between financial intermediaries and economic growth.[4] He has also examined bank supervision and corruption.[5]
He has written extensively on the financial crisis of 2007–2010. In April 2010, he published An Autopsy of the U.S. Financial System, which investigated the causes of the crisis. He found that while financial institutions certainly played a major role in the system's collapse, regulatory policies during the period from 1996-2006 also contributed to the crisis. He likens the government's role to negligent homicide.[6]
| “ | The evidence indicates that senior policymakers repeatedly designed, implemented, and maintained policies that destabilized the global financial system in the decade before the crisis. The policies incentivized financial institutions to engage in activities that generated enormous short-run profits but dramatically increased long-run fragility. Moreover, the evidence suggests that the regulatory agencies were aware of the consequences of their policies and yet chose not to modify those policies.[7] | ” |