Simpson GS '60 donates funds for new macroeconomics center

Louis Simpson GS ’60 donated $10 million to the University to establish the Louis A. Simpson Center for the Study of Macroeconomics, the University announced on Monday.

The center will be formally dedicated in October with a lecture featuring Ben Bernanke, former chair of the Federal Reserve, who chaired the University’s economics department from 1996-2002.

“We already have an excellent [macroeconomics] program," economics professor Gene Grossman, chair of the economics department and director of the International Economics Section, said. "But this is a very nice infusion of resources that will allow an expanded set of activities including postdoctoral scholars, visiting fellows during the year, conferences, summer workshops maybe."

The economics department has a number of research sections and centers organized around different economic subfields, including the Bendheim Center for Finance, labor economics and the International Economics Section, Grossmansaid.

"Macroeconomics was sort of the largest and most important group that really had no center that could provide resources for all of our macroeconomists to do research and support our graduate students and undergraduate research," he said. "So this was sort of in a sense filling in a hole."

The new center will not claim a building of its own but will be housed within the building at 20 Washington Road, Grossman said. The building is currently out of commission as it is being renovated.

The center will be a selling point to attract top-tier graduate students in macroeconomics, new Simpson Center director and economics professor Richard Rogerson said.

“One of the programs we are going to have is each year we are going to look for one of the star new Ph.D. students in macroeconomics and hopefully bring them here for a postdoc before they start their regular position elsewhere," Rogerson said. "So that means every year we are going to have one of the brightest young macroeconomists in the country here in residence to be interacting with faculty and students, so everybody is going to benefit from having people like that around."

The center should also put the University in a better position to train students and research the latest macroeconomic developments, economics professor Janet Currie said.

“I think it will put us on a really good path to training students in cutting-edge macro and supporting faculty who do that research,” she said.

Simpson was not available for comment.

He is currently a director at Verisign and has served on a number of corporate boards. He was also an economics instructor at the University from 1961-62.

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University spokesperson Martin Mbugua deferred comment to Wilson School public relations specialist B. Rose Huber, who deferred comment to Rogerson and Currie.