Chair Pays Tribute to Economist William Brainard’s Leadership

A new professorship has been established in honor of Yale economist and former provost William C. Brainard by his friends and colleagues.

Benjamin Polak has been named the inaugural William C. Brainard Professor of Economics (see related story).

The professorship celebrates Brainard’s leadership in teaching and research. It was created after David F. Swensen, the University’s chief investment officer and a former student of Brainard’s, enlisted the support of others whose lives were touched by the economist’s “impressive intellect, spirited discourse and generous spirit.”

“Bill Brainard influenced my life in many profound ways,” Swensen said in a letter to friends and colleagues. “As my teacher, dissertation adviser and friend, Bill provided the intellectual framework for my approach to economics and finance. Without Bill’s many important interventions in my life, my personal direction (and, perhaps, Yale’s financial direction) would have been quite different.”

Brainard is a specialist in economic theory, macroeconomics and monetary theory. He earned his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Yale in 1959 and 1963, respectively, and has taught at the University since 1962. His seminal paper “Uncertainty and the Effectiveness of Monetary Policy” (1967), analyzing how the conduct of policy should be affected by uncertainty about its impact, is still widely cited by policy makers. A frequent collaborator with Nobel Prize winning Yale economist James Tobin, he developed with Tobin the concept of “q” to help explain the way financial markets influence investment and economic activity.

Brainard was provost of the University from 1981 to 1986 and twice served as director of the Cowles Foundation for Research in Economics. He also chaired the Department of Economics. He was named the Frederick William Beinecke Professor of Economics in 1987 and became the first faculty member to hold the Arthur Okun Professorship in 1991.

In 1996, he was elected chair of the board of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. A fellow of the Econometric Society and a member of the American Economic Association, he has served as co-editor of the Brooking Papers on Economic Activity.

Brainard’s former students and colleagues at Yale held a major conference on campus in his honor in 2001.