Speaker Biographies

Rafael Di Tella is a professor of business administration at Harvard Business School, where he has been teaching and conducting research on the business environment since 1997. His main research is on the political economy of institutional development. One strand of his research is concerned with the causes of corruption and criminal behavior in a variety of contexts. Another set of projects has focused on the structure of the welfare state and the development of better measures of well-being. This has involved studying measures of happiness and the ways in which they can inform government policies on issues that range from the incidence of inequality to the inflation-unemployment tradeoff. Mr. Di Tella’s current research studies reversals of pro-market reform. His work has been published mainly in academic journals, including The Journal of Political Economy and the American Economic Review.

William Easterly is a professor of economics at New York University and codirector of NYU’s Development Research Institute. He is also a nonresident fellow at the Center for Global Development in Washington, D.C., and a visiting fellow at Brookings for the academic year 2007–2008. Mr. Easterly spent sixteen years as a research economist at the World Bank. He is the author of The White Man’s Burden: How the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good (Penguin, 2006), The Elusive Quest for Growth: Economists' Adventures and Misadventures in the Tropics (MIT, 2001), three other coedited books, and fifty-six articles in refereed economics journals. His work has been discussed in media outlets like the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, National Public Radio, the BBC, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, The Economist, The New Yorker, Forbes, Business Week, the Financial Times, the Times of London, the Guardian, and the Christian Science Monitor. Mr. Easterly’s areas of expertise are the determinants of long-run economic growth and the effectiveness of foreign aid. He has worked in most areas of the developing world, most heavily in Africa, Latin America, and Russia. Mr. Easterly is an associate editor of the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the Journal of Economic Growth, and of the Journal of Development Economics.

Nicholas Eberstadt holds the Henry Wendt Chair in Political Economy at AEI and is a senior adviser to the National Bureau of Asian Research in Seattle. He is a member of the President’s Council on Bioethics and the Helping Enhance the Livelihood of People Around the Globe Commission, and he has served on both the Board of Scientific Counselors for the National Center for Health Statistics of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Advisory Committee on Voluntary Foreign Aid for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). For over twenty years, Mr. Eberstadt served as a member of Harvard University’s Center for Population and Development Studies, and he continues to serve at Harvard as a member of the Visiting Committee for the Harvard School of Public Health. Mr. Eberstadt regularly consults for governmental and international organizations, including such institutions as the U.S. Census Bureau, U.S. State Department, USAID, and the World Bank. He has been invited to offer expert testimony before Congress on a variety of economic, social, and political issues. Mr. Eberstadt has published over three hundred studies and articles in scholarly and popular journals, mainly on topics in demography, international development, and East Asian security. His dozen-plus books and monographs include Poverty in China (International Development Institute, 1979), Fertility Decline in the Less Developed Countries (Praeger Publishers, 1981), The Poverty of Communism (Transaction, 1988), Foreign Aid and American Purpose (AEI Press, 1989), The Population of North Korea (Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, Berkeley, 1992), The Tyranny of Numbers (AEI Press, 1995), Prosperous Paupers and Other Population Problems (Transaction, 2000), Health and the Income Inequality Hypothesis (AEI Press, 2004), and, most recently, Europe’s Coming Demographic Challenge: Unlocking the Value of Health (AEI Press, 2007).

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