Program Leadership and Team
Dean of GSEFM
Professor Michael Binder, Ph.D.
Deputy Dean of GSEFM
Program Director
Professor Thomas Laubach, Ph.D.
Program Coordinator
Dean of GSEFM
Professor Michael Binder, Ph.D., Professor of Economics at Goethe University Frankfurt (Chair for International Macroeconomics and Macroeconometrics), is Dean of the Graduate School of Economics, Finance, and Management. Binder did his undergraduate coursework in economics, business administration and law at the University of Kiel, and received a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Pennsylvania in 1995. Upon completion of his Ph.D. he was a faculty member at the University of Maryland until 2003. Binder has been a Fulbright scholar, a Marie Curie research fellow, a scholar of the German National Scholarship Foundation, and has been the recipient of numerous teaching and advising awards. He has published on a variety of topics in macroeconomics and applied econometrics, and is/was an Associate Editor of the Journal of Applied Econometrics, the Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, and Empirical Economics. Binder has held visiting appointments inter alia at the University of Cambridge, the University of Munich, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the Bank of Spain.
Binder's current research in part examines the implications of financial and trade globalization for business cycle dynamics, output growth and exchange rate dynamics. This research involves the development of new econometric methods for macroeconomic panels, as well as the assembly of new cross-country panel data sets.
Deputy Dean of GSEFM
Professor Dr. Isabel Schnabel, Professor of Economics at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (Chair for Financial Economics), is Deputy Dean of the Graduate School of Economics, Finance, and Management. Schnabel did her Bachelor and Master level coursework at the universities of Mannheim, California-Berkeley and Paris. She received her doctorate in economics on "Macroeconomic Risks and Financial Crises – A Historical Perspective" from the University of Mannheim in 2003. Upon completion of her doctorate she was Assistant Professor at the University of Mannheim, Visiting Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University, and Senior Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods in Bonn, before joining Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz in 2007. Schnabel currently is a Research Affiliate of the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods and of the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR). Her current research is on international macroeconomics and finance (financial crises, lender of last resort, capital flows), on banking (banking stability and regulation, systemic risk), on economic history (financial institutions), as well as on applied microeconometrics.
Program Director
Professor Thomas Laubach, Ph.D., Professor of Economics at Goethe University Frankfurt (Chair for Macroeconomics), is Director of the Ph.D. Program in Economics and the MSQE Program with Tracks in Economics, Finance, and Marketing. Laubach received his Ph.D. in economics from Princeton University in 1997. Prior to joining the faculty of Goethe University Frankfurt in 2008, he worked as an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, and as an economist and senior economist, at the Federal Reserve Board. From 2003 to 2005, he was on secondment to the OECD's Economics Department. He currently also is a Research Professor at the Deutsche Bundesbank, and a Research Visitor at the European Central Bank. His current research focuses on macroeconomic effects of fiscal policies as well as the implications of alternative hypotheses about expectations formation in macroeconomics and finance.
Program Director
Olga Chandra, M.A., joined Goethe University Frankfurt in 2007, as coordinator of the MSQE and Ph.D. in Economics Programs. She holds a Master's degree in International Affairs from the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, University of Pittsburgh. Chandra served as Lecturer at Phillips University Marburg, and – before moving to Germany – she worked more than 13 years in the fields of international operations, marketing, and communications with AT&T Telecommunications in the United States. She speaks Hindi, Russian, Bengali, German, and English.