Axel Weber will teach MBA students
Axel Weber, president of Deutsche Bundesbank, is expected to become a visiting pro-
fessor at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. Although details are
still to be finalized, the appointment would begin soon after Dr. Weber steps down
from his position at Bundesbank, expected at the end of next month. At Chicago
Booth, he would teach MBA courses in central banking.
Weber has been president of the Bundesbank since 2004. The bank is part of the Euro-
system, sharing responsibility with the other national central banks and the Euro-
pean Central Bank for the single currency, the euro. Weber is currently on leave as
a professor of international economics at the University of Cologne.
He was a member of the German Council of Economic Experts, a group similar to the
President’s Council of Economic Advisors in the US. Earlier in his career he was a
director of the Center for Financial Studies in Frankfurt, a professor of applied
monetary economics at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt and a pro-
fessor of economic theory at the Rheinische Friedrich Wilhelms University in Bonn.
“After seven years as a practitioner as the head of a central bank, I have decided
to return to economic research in order to help answer the many questions posed by
economic policy after the financial crisis,” Weber said. “The University of Chicago
Booth School of Business is an excellent place for me because its faculty includes
many distinguished researchers who have already worked for several years on issues
related to the crisis and how to cope with it, and I personally know them.”
At Booth, Weber joins a faculty that includes Randall Kroszner, former governor of
the Federal Reserve System and Raghuram Rajan, former chief economist for the Inter-
national Monetary Fund and current economic advisor to Indian Prime Minister Mano-
ham Singh.
Weber will also be involved in Booth’s Initiative on Global Markets (IGM), a re-
search center that studies how global movement of capital, products, and people has
fundamentally changed the nature of business in the 21st century. The IGM, which
hosts the school’s annual US Monetary Policy Forum, focuses on international busi-
ness, financial markets, and role of policies and institutions. Co-directors of IGM
are senior Booth faculty members Anil Kashyap, a former economist at the Federal
Reserve System and Christian Leuz, a member of the Expert Group on Financial Market
Stability in Germany.
“I am looking forward to teaching at Chicago Booth because from my practical expe-
riences, especially during the financial crisis, I have learned several lessons,”
Weber said. “Results from economic research have been very important for the suc-
cess in containing the crisis, not the least by preventing us to repeat policy mi-
stakes committed in past crisis.”