A little History

In 1993, with the cooperation of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, the Economics Department at the University of Texas hosted the first Conference on Monetary Economics (the "Murray S. Johnson" conference). The success of this first encounter prompted many of the participants to pursue the idea of repeating the event on an annual basis, following the original format and rotating among the major Texas institutions. The following year an equally successful meeting was hosted by the Research Department of the Dallas Fed, and later on, from 1995 to 1997, the event was hosted in the Spring of each year by Texas A&M, Rice and Southern Methodist Universities. 1998 marked the "closing of the circle", and the University of Texas hosted the encounter for the second time, followed again by the Dallas Fed in 1999. In April 2000, the conference is taking place at Texas A&M in College Station.

The format, that proved so successful the first time, has remained basically unchanged: an invitation to first rate macro and monetary economists from anywhere, with discussants from the six major Texas institutions. An incomplete list of presenters in past conferences include Joshua Aizenman, Costas Azariadis, Laurence Ball, Jess Benhabib, Craig Burnside, Lawrence Christiano, Richard Clarida, John Coleman, Thomas Cooley, Russell Cooper, Dean Corbae, Eduardo Engel, Roger Farmer, Timothy Fuerst, Mark Gertler, Simon Gilchrist, Jo Anna Gray, Edward Green, Jeremy Greenwood, Gary Hansen, Peter Ireland, Larry Jones, Boyan Jovanovic, Patrick Kehoe, Nobuhiro Kiyotaki, Narayana Kockerlakota, Per Krusell, Finn Kydland, Pamela Labadie, Owen Lamont, Lee Ohanian, Edward Prescott, Assaf Razin, Sergio Rebelo, Victor Rios Lull, Stacey Schreft, Bruce Smith, Carlos Vegh, Neil Wallace, Steve Williamson, Michael Woodford and Randall Wright.