William Barnett

Bill Barnett
  • Director at the Center for Financial Stability
  • Charles W. Oswald Distinguished Professor of Macroeconomics

Contact Info

Department Phone:
785-864-3501
Fax:
785-864-5270
Snow Hall, room #356

Personal Links

Biography —

Barnett is currently the Oswald Distinguished Professor of Macroeconomics at the University of Kansas and Director, Center for Financial Stability, in New York City. He is a Fellow of the Institute for Applied Economics at Johns Hopkins University. He was previously Research Economist at the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System in Washington, D.C.; Stuart Centennial Professor of Economics at the University of Texas at Austin; and Professor of Economics at Washington University in St. Louis. Prior to becoming an economist, he worked as an engineer at Rocketdyne on development of the Rocketdyne F-1 rocket engine.

Research —

My research is in macroeconomics and econometrics. I am the founder and first President of the Society for Economic Measurement, Founding Editor of the Cambridge University Press journal, Macroeconomic Dynamics, and originator of the Divisia monetary aggregates. In consumer demand and production modelling, I originated the Laurent series approach to specification design and the seminonparametric approach using the Müntz–Szász theorem. My publications on bifurcation analysis and nonlinear dynamics have shown that robustness of dynamical inferences is compromised, when policy simulations are run only at point estimates of parameters, since confidence regions about those estimates are often crossed by bifurcation boundaries.

Research interests:

  • Financial economics
  • financial econometrics
  • microeconomic foundations for macroeconomics and monetary theory
  • capital asset pricing
  • financial aggregation theory
  • monetary asset demand modeling
  • extensions of index number theory to risk
  • empirical and theoretical consumer demand modeling
  • applied and theoretical econometrics
  • the household production function approach
  • application of the Laurent and Müntz-Szatz series in consumer demand & factor demand system modeling
  • Bayesian and sampling theoretic inference in infinite dimensional parameter spaces
  • semiparametric and seminonparametric inference
  • macroeconometrics, tests for nonlinearity and chaos
  • nonlinear time series
  • frequency domain time series
  • location of bifurcation boundaries in macroeconometric models.

Teaching —

I teach advanced courses for PhD students in macroeconomics, monetary economics, and econometrics.
 

ECON 811

Office Hours
Mondays/Wednesdays: 12:15pm - 1:30pm

Teaching interests:

  • Macroeconomics
  • monetary economics
  • econometrics
  • aggregation and index number theory.

Service —

Within the department, I serve on the promotion and tenure committee and many PhD dissertation committees. I invite and host many of the guest speakers who come to the department to give seminars. Within the university, I participate in some activities of the Distinguished Professors. Within the profession, I am founder and editor of the Cambridge University Press monograph series, Macroeconomic Dynamics; and I am founder and the first president of the Society for Economic Measurement.