Foundation

Roger Alcaly

Roger Alcaly is a principal and director of Mount Lucas Management Corporation, an investment firm that provides alternative investment services to institutional investors and high net worth individuals. A former partner at Kellner, DiLeo & Co., he served in the Carter administration (as Assistant Director of the Council on Wage and Price Stability), at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York (as a Senior Economist), and taught economics for 10 years at Columbia University. He holds a B.A. from Amherst College and a Ph.D. in Economics from Princeton University and is the author of The New Economy: What it is, How it Happened, and Why it is Likely to Last, which was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in June 2003. He also writes periodically for the New York Review of Books, most recently, "How They Killed the Economy," March 25, 2010.

I am continually impressed by the vitality and promise of the diverse CERGE-EI student body and by CERGE-EI's success in educating students from developing countries in modern economics. The doctoral program attracts the most promising students from a wide range of regions and educational backgrounds. Importantly, a huge percentage of CERGE-EI graduates remain in the region to serve in creating and implementing economic policy for developing countries that are often still emerging from the effects of communism. CERGE-EI's program is extremely cost-effective and ranks among the best efforts at making possible a rational, productive future for this region and the world.

Orley C. Ashenfelter

Orley C. Ashenfelter is the Joseph Douglas Green 1895 Professor of Economics at Princeton University and Acting Director of the university’s Industrial Relations Section. He has been director of the Office of Evaluation of the U.S. Department of Labor, a Guggenheim Fellow, and the Benjamin Meeker Visiting Professor at the University of Bristol. He is a recipient of the IZA Prize in Labor Economics, the Society of Labor Economists’ Mincer Award for Lifetime Achievement and a Fellow of the Econometric Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Society of Labor Economists, a Distinguished Fellow of the American Economic Association, and a Corresponding Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. He edited the Handbook of Labor Economics and was previously co-editor of the American Law and Economics Review and editor of the American Economic Review. He is currently President-Elect of the American Economic Association. Prof. Ashenfelter’s areas of specialization include labor economics, econometrics, and law and economics, and his research includes many issues related to the economics of labor markets.

CERGE-EI is more than fulfilling its initial promise to provide top-quality Ph.D. education in economics to students from developing countries: the program is innovative in answering its students’ needs and diligent in preparing them to serve as economic leaders for the future.

Our goal at the Foundation has been to permit this fledgling institute to support graduate students and faculty to build the infrastructure that was missing from the previously Communist states of much of Europe. I support the goal and I believe the Foundation has played a key role in permitting CERGE-EI to compete with institutions of Western Europe, which is critical to maintaining a presence in Eastern Europe. In all my experiences, the Foundation has been cost effective, committed, and essential to its purpose.