Ralf Hepp is visiting the department for the 2009-10 academic year from Fordham University, New York, where he is an Assistant Professor of Economics. He has a Ph.D. in International Economics from the University of California, Santa Cruz. While he will mostly be conducting research during his sabbatical stay, he has accepted to teach an undergraduate course in International Finance.
His research interests lie mainly in open-economy macroeconomics and development economics. Most recently, he has written with co-author Jürgen von Hagen a couple of research papers on the German fiscal system. They have investigated the degree of income and consumption smoothing at the state level for the last four decades as well as risk-sharing properties of the system – a topic at the intersection of macroeconomics and public finance. Prof. Hepp is currently working on a project on financial liberalization and the role of capital controls and foreign exchange reserves in the economic development of emerging market economies.