This past June, Christopher Waller, the department's Gilbert F. Schaefer Professor of Economics, went on loan to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, beginning a two-year term as a senior vice president and the director of research there.
In his new role, Waller oversees the research department and advises the bank president on policy. His duties also include attending Federal Open Market Committee meetings, which determine monetary policy regarding interest rates, in Washington, D.C.
Waller has been a member of the Notre Dame faculty since 2003 and will return to the department full time following his two years at the St. Louis Fed. Next fall, however, he does expect to be able to teach an undergraduate course on campus.
An expert on monetary theory, dollarization, and the political economy of central banking, he has served as a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, the Federal Reserve Banks of St. Louis and Cleveland, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the Economics Education and Research Consortium. His research has been published in some of the discipline's top journals, the American Economic Review, the Journal of Monetary Economics, and the Quarterly Journal of Economics among them.