Principles of Economics

About the Author

Robert Frank

Robert H. Frank is the H. J. Louis Professor of Management and Professor of Economics, emeritus, at Cornell’s Johnson School of Management, where he taught from 1972 to 2020. After receiving his B.S. from Georgia Tech in 1966, he taught math and science for two years as a Peace Corps Volunteer in rural Nepal. He received his M.A. in statistics in 1971 and his Ph.D. in economics in 1972 from The University of California at Berkeley. He also holds honorary doctorate degrees from the University of St. Gallen and Dalhousie University. During leaves of absence from Cornell, he has served as chief economist for the Civil Aeronautics Board (1978–1980), a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (1992–1993), Professor of American Civilization at l’Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris (2000–2001), and the Peter and Charlotte Schoenfeld Visiting Faculty Fellow at the NYU Stern School of Business in 2008–2009. His papers have appeared in the American Economic Review, Econometrica, the Journal of Polit-ical Economy, and other leading professional journals, and for more than two decades, his economics columns appeared regu-larly in The New York Times.

His research has focused on rivalry and cooperation in economic and social behavior. His books on these themes include Choosing the Right Pond (Oxford, 1985), Passions Within Reason (W. W. Norton, 1988), What Price the Moral High Ground? (Princeton, 2004), Falling Behind (University of California Press, 2007), The Economic Naturalist (Basic Books, 2007), The Economic Naturalist’s Field Guide (Basic Books, 2009), The Darwin Economy (Princeton, 2011), Success and Luck (Princeton, 2016), and Under the Influence (Princeton, 2020), which have been translated into 24 languages. The Winner-Take-All Society (The Free Press, 1995), co-authored with Philip Cook, received a Critic’s Choice Award, was named a Notable Book of the Year by The New York Times, and was included in BusinessWeek’s list of the 10 best books of 1995. Luxury Fever (The Free Press, 1999) was named to the Knight-Ridder Best Books list for 1999. Professor Frank is a co-recipient of the 2004 Leontief Prize for Advancing the Frontiers of Economic Thought. He was awarded the Johnson School’s Stephen Russell Distinguished Teaching Award in 2004, 2010, 2012, and 2018, and the School’s Apple Distinguished Teaching Award in 2005. His introductory microeconomics course has graduated more than 7,000 enthusiastic economic naturalists over the years.

Ben Bernanke

2022 Nobel Prize winner, Professor Bernanke received his B.A. in economics from Harvard University in 1975 and his Ph.D. in economics from MIT in 1979. He taught at the Stanford Graduate School of Business from 1979 to 1985 and moved to Princeton University in 1985, where he was named the Howard Harrison and Gabrielle Snyder Beck Professor of Economics and Public Affairs where he served as chair of the Economics Department. Professor Bernanke is currently a Distinguished Fellow in Residence with the Economic Studies Program at the Brookings Institution.

Professor Bernanke was sworn in on February 1, 2006, as chair and a member of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System; his second term expired January 31, 2014. Professor Bernanke also served as chair of the Federal Open Market Committee, the Fed’s principal monetary policymaking body. Professor Bernanke was also chair of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers from June 2005 to January 2006. Professor Bernanke’s intermediate textbook, with Andrew Abel and Dean Croushore, Macroeconomics, 9th Edition (Addison-Wesley, 2017), is a best-seller in its field. He has authored numerous scholarly publications in macroeconomics, macroeconomic history, and finance. He has done significant research on the causes of the Great Depression, the role of financial markets and institutions in the business cycle, and measurement of the effects of monetary policy on the economy.

Professor Bernanke has held a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Sloan Fellowship, and he is a Fellow of the Econometric Society and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He served as the director of the Monetary Economics Program of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) and as a member of the NBER’s Business Cycle Dating Committee. From 2001 to 2004 he served as editor of the American Economic Review, and as president of the American Economic Association in 2019. Professor Bernanke’s work with civic and professional groups includes having served two terms as a member of the Montgomery Township (New Jersey) Board of Education.

In 2022, Dr. Bernanke, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in Stockholm, Sweden. He was awarded the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2022 for his work on bank runs and measures to prevent them. He changed our understanding of economic downturns. Dr. Bernanke’s research showed how bank runs and failed monetary policy prolonged the Great Depression (1929-1939). Bernanke’s work was invaluable during the 2008 global financial crisis when, as Fed Chair, he applied the lessons from the great depression and pioneered the emergency lending programs the central banks used to address the crisis.

Kate Antonovics

Professor Antonovics received her B.A. from Brown University in 1993 and her Ph.D. in economics from the University of Wisconsin in 2000. Shortly thereafter, she joined the faculty in the Economics Department at the University of California, San Diego, where she has been ever since. Professor Antonovics is known for her superb teaching and her innovative use of technology in the classroom. Her highly popular introductory-level microeconomics course regularly enrolls over 450 students each fall. She also teaches labor economics at both the undergraduate and graduate level. In 2012, she received the UCSD Department of Economics award for best undergraduate teaching. Professor Antonovics’s research has focused on racial discrimination, gender discrimination, affirmative action, intergenerational income mobility, learning, and wage dynamics. Her papers have appeared in the American Economic Review, the Review of Economics and Statistics, the Journal of Labor Economics, and the Journal of Human Resources. She is a member of both the American Economic Association and the Society of Labor Economists.

Ori Heffetz

Professor Heffetz received his B.A. in physics and philosophy from Tel Aviv University in 1999 and his Ph.D. in economics from Princeton University in 2005. He is a Professor of Economics at the Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell University, and at the Economics Department at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Bringing the real world into the classroom, Professor Heffetz has created a unique macroeconomics course that introduces basic concepts and tools from economic theory and applies them to current news and global events. His popular classes are taken by hundreds of students every year on Cornell’s Ithaca and New York City campuses, in Jerusalem, in Toronto, and via live videoconferencing in dozens of cities across the United States, Canada, and Latin America.

Professor Heffetz’s research studies the social and cultural aspects of economic behavior, focusing on the mechanisms that drive consumers’ choices and on the links between economic choices, individual well-being, and policymaking. He has published scholarly work on economic indicators, well-being measures, household consumption patterns, individual economic decision making, and survey methodology and measurement. He was a visiting scholar at the Bank of Israel (2011), UC Berkeley (2019), Harvard (2019), and Princeton (2022); is currently a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER); and serves as chair of the Public Council of Statistics Israel and as editor ofSocial Choice and Welfare.