Dr. Steven Gjerstad
- Education:
- University of Minnesota - Twin Cities, Bachelor of Science
University of Minnesota - Twin Cities, Master of Arts
University of Minnesota - Twin Cities, Ph.D.
Biography
Steven Gjerstad is Presidential Fellow in the Economics Science Institute at Chapman University. Dr. Gjerstad has a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Minnesota and came to Chapman University in 2008 from Purdue University. Going back at least to 1945 with Freidrich Hayek's influential paper "The Use of Knowledge in Society" economists have marveled that the price mechanism is central to the operation of the economy, yet the price mechanism is almost entirely self-regulating. Attempts to control and manage the price system, such as Nixon's wage and price controls in 1971, have been infrequent and unhelpful. Experimental economics has contributed important insights into the capacity for self-regulation of markets and the price system, starting with Chapman professor and Nobel Laureate Vernon L. Smith's 1962 paper "An Experimental Study of Competitive Market Behavior." In Dr. Gjerstad's Ph.D. thesis, he sought to better understand the processes behind self-regulation of the price system by developing a model that captures most aspects of human behavior in markets like those in Dr. Smith's 1962 paper. Later, IBM's T.J. Watson Research Center, Dr. Gjerstad created experiments that mixed human subjects with AI agents for markets, showing that his models could perform better than human traders. This work has been published in Games and Economic Behavior, Economic Theory, and the Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control.
During and after the financial crisis Dr. Gjerstad and Professor Smith wrote several articles about it for the Wall Street Journal and analyzed its causes and consequences in papers in The Critical Review, The American Interest, Cato Journal, a comparison of similarity of root causes between the Great Recession and the Great Depression for the National Bureau of Economic Research, and a book on the history of economic cycles for Cambridge University Press.
Dr. Gjerstad currently teaches courses on statistical analysis of time series and on artificial intelligence models in financial markets.
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Recent Creative, Scholarly Work and Publications
- "At Home in the Great Recession," in The 4% Solution, Brendan Miniter, Ed., New York: Crown Publishing Group.
- "Underwater Recession," The American Interest, May/June 2012, pp. 20 - 28.
- "Monetary Policy, Credit Extension, and Housing Bubbles: 2008 and 1929," in What Caused the Financial Crisis, Jeffrey Friedman, Ed., Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
- "Bolla immobiliare una costante nelle grandi crisi," La Repubblica, May 25.
- "Monetary Policy, Credit Extension, and Housing Bubbles: 2008 and 1929," Critical Review, Vol. 21: 2-3, pp. 269 - 300. http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/08913810902934117#preview