Jim Anderson chairs the department

Following six very successful years of leading the department of economics, Prof. Marvin Kraus has stepped down as chairperson, and Prof. Jim Anderson is the department's new leader. Kraus presided over the department's successful recruitment efforts and a review of the department's undergraduate program that led to significant strengthening of the curriculum during a time of very heavy demand for the undergraduate major. During his tenure, the department realised a long-standing goal and gained its first endowed chairs in 2004, 2005, 2006 and 2007. The department's graduate program, as noted below, rose in the rankings over the years of Kraus's chairmanship.

James E. Anderson, the department's first chairholder, is the William B. Neenan, SJ Millennium Chair in Economics, honoring the noted economist and University administrator. Anderson, an Oberlin College graduate and recipient of the Ph.D. from University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1969, has spent his entire professional career on the Boston College faculty, being promoted to Professor in 1977. He is one of the department's most noted scholars, having published numerous articles in leading journals on the theory of international trade and trade policy. In the last decade he has focused on index numbers of trade policy. His recent work on the evaluation of trade policy, Measuring the Restrictiveness of International Trade Policy, coauthored with J. Peter Neary, was published by MIT Press in 2006. Anderson is perhaps best known for the economic theory of gravity (AER, 1979). Multilateral resistance indexes capture the effect on bilateral trade of the partners' trade costs with all other parties. Applications resolve the border puzzle (why the US-Canada border appears so costly; AER, 2003) and the mystery of the missing globalization (why gravity coefficients are constant yet trade/GDP rises; NBER, 2008). A related line of research focuses on insecurity and its implicit effect on trade.

Anderson is a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research and has been a Visiting Scholar an the Institute for International Economic Studies (Stockholm), Harvard University, University of Konstanz, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Brookings Institution and London School of Economics.