Laurence M. Ball
Professor
Office: Mergenthaler Hall 431
Office Hours: By appointment
Phone: 410.516.7605
Email: lball@jhu.edu
Curriculum Vitae (PDF)
In addition to my duties at Hopkins, I am a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research and a Visiting Scholar at the International Monetary Fund. I have previously visited a number of central banks, including the Federal Reserve, the Bank of Japan, the Bank of England, and the Reserve Bank of New Zealand. My research focuses on unemployment, inflation, and fiscal and monetary policy, and I am the author of Money, Banking, and Financial Markets (Worth Publishers, second edition 2012).
Working Papers
Ben Bernanke and the Zero Bound, February 2012.
Unemployment in Latin America and the Caribbean (with Nicolás De Roux and Marc Hofstetter), July 2011.
Comment on "Inflation Targeting in Latin America: Toward a Monetary Union?", June 2011.
Inflation Dynamics and the Great Recession (with Sandeep Mazumder), May 2011.
The Performance of Alternative Monetary Regimes, June 2010.
Policy Responses to Exchange-Rate Movements, July 2009.
Hysteresis in Unemployment: Old and New Evidence, March 2009.
Non-Technical Writings
"Ben Bernanke and the zero bound", February 2012.
"Painful Medicine", September 2011.
Testimony on "Federal Debt and the U.S. Economy", Joint Economic Committee, September 2011
The Unemployment Crisis, January 2011.
Testimony on Federal Reserve policy, House Committee on Financial Services, March 2010.
Textbooks
Money, Banking, and Financial Markets, 2nd ed., Worth Publishers, 2011.
Macroeconomics and the Financial System (with N. Gregory Mankiw), Worth Publishers, 2011.
Economics 261 -- Monetary Analysis:
Analysis of money, banking, and government debt, with emphasis on coherent models with microeconomic foundations. Topics include barter and commodity money, monetary institutions in historical perspective, international monetary systems; portfolio theory, liquidity, financial intermediation, bank risk, central banking; debts and deficits, savings and investment, the temptation of inflation. The course aims at providing students with the means to analyze monetary questions and institutions.Economics 302 -- Macroeconomic Theory:
This undergraduate course provides a treatment of macroeconomic theory including a static analysis of the determination of output, employment, the price level, the rate of interest, and a dynamic analysis of growth, inflation, and business cycles. In addition, the use and effectiveness of monetary and fiscal policy to bring about full employment, price stability, and steady economic growth will be discussed.Economics 605 -- Advanced Macroeconomics:
This is a graduate course covering selected topics in macroeconomics. These include nominal rigidities, dynamic-consistency theories of inflation, inflation inertia and the costs of disinflation, monetary policy, costs and benefits of price stability, benefits of output stabilization, alternative policy rules, measuring inflation, unemployment, efficiency-wage theories, the behavior of the NAIRU, macro in middle-income countries, high inflation and stabilization, currency crises.