University of Chicago Booth School of Business Podcast Series

Increased demand for skilled workers has created wage inequality between those who have college degrees and those who don't in the United States, but the news isn't all bad, according to Kevin Murphy, George J. Stigler Distinguished Service Professor of Economics.

Microfinance is not as a suite of social products, it's a platform for social development through business, according to Alex Counts, president of the Grameen Foundation.

This broadcast features Nobel Laureate Gary Becker, University Professor of Economics and of Sociology. The GSB's Becker Center on Chicago Price Theory hosted the first in a series of lunchtime discussions. Professor Becker talks about the benefits of setting a price for immigration.

This broadcast features Luigi Zingales, Robert C. McCormack Professor of Entrepreneurship and Finance. Zingales is also a member of the Committee on Capital Market Regulation. He reports on the committee's findings regarding concerns that excessive regulation is stifling the public securities markets and causing U.S. markets to lose business to foreign competitiors.

The long string of major financial crises that beset emerging markets from 1994 to 2002 was caused by a variety of factors, according to John Taylor, former U.S. Under Secretary of Treasury for International Affairs. Among those were countries trying to peg their exchange rates while inflation at home exceeded inflation abroad. "Essentially that means your exchange rate gets out of line or overvalued," he said. "Eventually currencies depreciated. On top of that, many emerging-market countries had borrowed in dollars, but their earnings were in local currency. A sudden depreciation meant they had to pay a lot more dollars back, which led to a debt problem." The International Monetary Fund's unpredictable responses to the crises further complicated the problem, Taylor said.

At Chicago's Business School, Zonis teaches courses on International Political Economy, Leadership, and E-Commerce. He was the first professor at the Business School to teach a course on the effects of digital technologies on global business. He also consults to corporations and professional asset management firms throughout the world, helping them to identify, assess, and manage their political risks in the changing global environment. Zonis is a co-founder and Chairman of DSD, a software development company based in Moscow and Chicago. What unites these activities is Zonis' unique awareness of the intersections of politics, economics, and emergent technologies.

Michael Mussa, AM '70, PhD '74, Senior Fellow, Institute for International Economics. He served as Economic Counselor and Director of the Department of Research at the International Monetary Fund from 1991-2001, where he was responsible for advising the Management of the Fund and the Fund's Executive Board on broad issues of economic policy and for providing analysis of ongoing developments in the world economy. By appointment of President Ronald Reagan, Mussa served as a member of the US Council of Economic Advisers from August 1986 to September 1988. He was a member of the faculty of the Graduate School of Business of the University of Chicago (1976-91) and was on the faculty of the Department of Economics at the University of Rochester (1971-76).

Austan D. Goolsbee, Robert P. Gwinn Professor of Economics, currently works as a member of the U.S. Census Advisory Committee, a Research Associate for the National Bureau of Economic Research, and a columnist for the New York Times.

Demographics are the "sleeper driver" that will affect several other trends, according to Paul Laudicina, managing officer and chairman of the board for A.T. Kearney. The author of World Out of Balance, he put demographics at the top of the list of five drivers of change; others include the "new consumer" and natural resources and environmental regulation and activism. "Demographics is clearly driving lots of the other trends," he said. "Certainly in the last 50 years we've had greater advances in life expectancy than in the last 5,000."

Hyperion executive chairman chats with Dean Snyder about how his view of leadership encompasses employees.