Federal Economic Statistics Advisory Committee (FESAC)

The Federal Economic Statistics Advisory Committee (FESAC) advises the Directors of the Department of Commerce's statistical agencies, the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) and the U.S. Census Bureau, and the Commissioner of the Department of Labor's Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), on statistical methodology and other technical matters related to the collection, tabulation, and analysis of federal economic statistics.

Upcoming Meetings: June 10, 2022

Current Members

Matthew Shapiro

(FESAC Chairman)

University of Michigan

Matthew D. Shapiro is the Lawrence R. Klein Collegiate Professor of Economics and the director of the Survey Research Center at the University of Michigan. He is a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. During 1993-1994, Shapiro served as senior economist at the Council of Economic Advisers with responsibilities for macroeconomic analysis and the weekly economic briefing of the president. He was a junior staff economist at the council, 1979-1980. Before joining the University of Michigan faculty in 1989, Shapiro was an assistant professor of economics at Yale and a member of the Cowles Foundation for Research in Economics. He was co-editor of the American Economic Review, 1997 to 2000 and editor of the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, 2014 to 2019.

Shapiro is a member of the Academic Advisory Council of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. He has served as chair of the American Economic Association Committee on Economic Statistics (AEAStat) and as a member of the National Academy of Sciences’ Committee on National Statistics (CNSTAT). He received B.A. and M.A. degrees from Yale and a Ph.D. from MIT.

Joseph Altonji

Yale University and the National Bureau of Economic Research

Joseph Altonji is the Thomas DeWitt Cuyler Professor of Economics at Yale University and a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. He previously held faculty positions at Columbia and Northwestern and served as a visiting professor at Princeton and Harvard. He is an elected fellow of the Econometric Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is also an elected fellow and past president of the Society of Labor Economists and president of the Eastern Economic Association. He received the IZA Prize in Labor Economics in 2018.

Altonji specializes in labor economics and applied econometrics. His interests include labor market fluctuations, labor supply, consumption behavior, the economics of education, economic links among family members, race and gender in the labor market, wage determination, and econometric methods. Altonji has served as a consultant to the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago and on advisory panels including the National Academy of Sciences’ Committee on National Statistics (CNSTAT) and the National Science Foundation Social, Behavior and Economic Sciences Advisory Committee. Altonji received his Ph.D. in economics from Princeton and his M.A. and B.A. from Yale.

Pat Bajari

Amazon and University of Washington

Patrick Bajari is vice president of the Core Artificial Intelligence team and chief economist at Amazon. His team is comprised of approximately 100 software engineers and scientists in machine learning, statistics, operations research and econometrics. Since joining Amazon in 2010, his team has helped to build scalable systems for supply chain, transportation, pricing, automated marketing, robotics, forecasting, Human Resources, and others.

Prior to joining Amazon, he was a faculty member at Harvard, Stanford, Duke, Michigan, and Minnesota. He is also a professor of economics at the University of Washington, a fellow of the Econometric Society, and on the board of directors of the National Association for Business Economics.

Erica Groshen

Cornell University and Upjohn Institute for Employment Research

Erica Groshen is senior economics advisor at the Cornell University School of Industrial and Labor Relations and a research fellow at the Upjohn Institute for Employment Research. From 2013 to 2017, she served as commissioner of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the principal federal agency responsible for measuring labor market activity, working conditions, and inflation. Before that she was vice president in the Research and Statistics Group of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Her research has centered on jobless recoveries, wage rigidity and dispersion, and the role of employers in the labor market.

Groshen is the lead author of “Preparing U.S. Workers and Employers for an Autonomous Vehicle Future,” with Susan Helper, John Paul MacDuffie, and Charles Carson. She also co-authored “How New is the ‘New Employment Contract’?” and co-edited “Structural Changes in U.S. Labor Markets: Causes and Consequences.” She received the 2017 Susan C. Eaton Outstanding Scholar-Practitioner Award from the Labor and Employment Relations Association. She holds a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard and a B.S. in mathematics and economics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

John Haltiwanger

University of Maryland-College Park

John Haltiwanger is a distinguished university professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Maryland and the first recipient of the Dudley and Louisa Dillard Professorship. After serving on the faculty of UCLA and Johns Hopkins University, he joined the faculty at Maryland in 1987. In the late 1990s, he served as chief economist of the U.S. Census Bureau. He is a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, a senior research fellow at the Center for Economic Studies at the U.S. Census Bureau, and a fellow of the Society of Labor Economics and the Econometric Society. He has played a major role in developing and studying U.S. longitudinal firm-level data.

His work with the statistical agencies was recognized with the Julius Shiskin Award for economic statistics in 2013, the Roger Herriott Award for innovation in federal statistics in 2014, and the Global Entrepreneurship Research Award in 2020. He has published more than 100 academic articles and numerous books, including “Job Creation and Destruction.” He received his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins.

Colm O'Muircheartaigh

University of Chicago

Colm O'Muircheartaigh is a professor at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy and served as dean of Harris from 2009 to 2014. He is also a senior fellow at NORC at the University of Chicago. O'Muircheartaigh is co-investigator on the National Institute on Aging's [NIA] National Social Life, Health, and Aging Project (NSHAP) and on the NIA T-32 Training Program in the Demography and Economics of Aging. O'Muircheartaigh joined Harris in 1998 from the London School of Economics and Political Science, where he was the first director of the Methodology Institute, the center for research and training in social science methodology, and a faculty member of the Department of Statistics from 1971.

Formerly president of the International Association of Survey Statisticians and a council member of the International Statistical Institute, O'Muircheartaigh is actively involved in a number of professional bodies. He is a fellow of the Royal Statistical Society, a fellow of the American Statistical Association, and an elected member of the International Statistical Institute; he has served as a member of the Committee on National Statistics [CNSTAT] and the U.S. Census Bureau Federal Advisory Committee of Professional Associations. He has served as a consultant to a wide range of public and commercial organizations in the United States, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Italy, and the Netherlands and worked through international organizations in China, Myanmar, Kenya, Lesotho, and Peru.

Mel Stephens

University of Michigan

Mel Stephens is professor of economics at the University of Michigan, with a courtesy appointment at the Ford School. He serves as a research affiliate at the Population Studies Center and a faculty associate at the Survey Research Center, both within the Institute for Social Research. Stephens is also affiliated with the National Bureau of Economic Research, currently as a research associate. He has previously served as a member of the Academic Research Council at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Stephens is a labor economist whose research interests include consumption and savings, aging and retirement, education, the impact of local labor market fluctuations on household outcomes, and applied econometrics. He received his B.A. in economics and mathematics from the University of Maryland and his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Michigan.

David Weinstein

Columbia University

David Weinstein is the Carl S. Shoup Professor of the Japanese Economy at Columbia University. He is also the director at Columbia’s Center on Japanese Economy and Business, director of the Japan Project at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Previously, Weinstein was chair of the Economics Department and senior economist as well as a consultant at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, and the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. Prior to joining the Columbia faculty, he held professorships at the University of Michigan and Harvard University. He also served on the Council of Economic Advisors from 1989 to 1990.

Weinstein is the recipient of many grants and awards, including five National Science Foundation grants, an Institute for New Economic Thinking grant, a Bank of International Settlements Fellowship, and a Google Research Award. He earned his Ph.D. and M.A. in economics from the University of Michigan and his B.A. at Yale.

David Wilcox

Peterson Institute for International Economics

David Wilcox joined the Peterson Institute for International Economics in August 2019, and is now a senior fellow there. His current research focuses on the U.S. macroeconomy, monetary policy, and diversity and inclusion, especially in the economics profession. Previously, he served roughly 30 years as member of the staff of the Federal Reserve Board, including as deputy director (2001-11) and director (2011-18) in the Division of Research and Statistics. In the latter role, he functioned as the chief economist of the division, a senior advisor to three successive chairs of the Federal Reserve Board, the division's lead for strategic direction, and its chief manager. He also served as assistant secretary for economic policy at the Treasury Department from 1997 to 2001, and as a senior economist at the Council of Economic Advisers from 1994 to 1995.

Wilcox is the author of many publications, including "Okun Revisited: Who Benefits Most From a Strong Economy?" He serves on a task force commissioned by the American Economic Association to recommend best practices for improving diversity and inclusion in the economics profession. Wilcox received a Ph.D. in economics from the MIT and a B.A. in mathematics from Williams College.

Kirk Wolter

University of Chicago and National Opinion Research Center (NORC)

Kirk Wolter is principal statistical advisor and distinguished senior fellow with NORC at the University of Chicago. He is also a professor in the university’s Department of Statistics. Wolter is an internationally recognized expert in survey statistics and methods and author of “Introduction to Variance Estimation,” which is widely read by survey practitioners and theoreticians.

Wolter has led or participated in designing many of the United States’ largest and most important information systems, including the Current Business Surveys and the Current Employment Statistics program. He also led the conversion of major market research surveys to scanning-based methods, both in the United States and in many parts of Western Europe. Before joining NORC in 1994, Wolter was vice president, statistical design worldwide, for the A.C. Nielsen Co., where he had executive accountability for statistical methodology in 30 countries. Wolter worked for 14 years at the U.S. Census Bureau, including as chief of the Statistical Research Division. He served as adjunct professor at George Washington University. In 2002-03, he founded and directed the Interdisciplinary Research Institute for Survey Science at Iowa State University. Wolter is a fellow of the American Statistical Association, an elected member of the International Statistical Institute, a past president of the International Association of Survey Statisticians, and a past chair of the Survey Research Methods Section of the American Statistical Association. He received his Ph.D. in statistics from Iowa State University.