2025 ECB Forum – Speakers

Programme and live webcast

His research focuses on the economics of innovation and growth. Alongside Peter Howitt, he pioneered the Schumpeterian Growth Theory, which became a leading paradigm for analysing the interplay between growth, innovation, market structure and firm dynamics. Much of this work is summarised in Endogenous Growth Theory (MIT Press, 1998) and The Economics of Growth (MIT Press, 2009), in his book with Rachel Griffith, Competition and Growth (MIT Press, 2006), in his survey “What Do We Learn from Schumpeterian Growth Theory”, and more recently in “The Power of Creative Destruction”. 

In 2001 Mr Aghion received the Yrjö Jahnsson Award for the best European economist under the age of 45. In 2009 he received the John von Neumann Award and in March 2020 he shared the BBVA Foundation Frontier of Knowledge Award with Peter Howitt for “developing an economic growth theory based on the innovation that emerges from the process of creative destruction”.

Mr Bailey attended Queens’ College Cambridge in 1978‐84 where he gained a bachelor’s degree in history with first-class honours and a PhD in economic history.

He served as Chief Executive Officer of the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) from July 2016 until taking up the role of Governor of the Bank of England. As Chief Executive Officer of the FCA, he was also a member of the Prudential Regulation Committee, the Financial Policy Committee and the Board of the Financial Conduct Authority.

He previously held the role of Deputy Governor, Prudential Regulation, and Chief Executive Officer of the Prudential Regulation Authority from April 2013. While retaining his role as Executive Director of the Bank of England, he joined the Financial Services Authority in April 2011 as Deputy Head of the Prudential Business Unit and Director of UK Banks and Building Societies. In July 2012 he took up the position of Managing Director of the Prudential Business Unit, with responsibility for the prudential supervision of banks, investment banks and insurance companies. He was appointed as a voting member of the interim Financial Policy Committee at its June 2012 meeting.

Before that, he worked at the Bank of England in a number of areas, including as Executive Director for Banking Services and Chief Cashier, as well as Head of the Bank's Special Resolution Unit. Other roles include Governor's Private Secretary and Head of the International Economic Analysis Division in Monetary Analysis.

She was Chief Economist at the French Treasury in 2020-23. And in 2012-17 she chaired the French Council of Economic Analysis. Her previous roles include Director of CEPII, the French institute for research in international economics (2006-12), and academic positions at the University Paris Nanterre, the University of Lille, Cergy-Pontoise University and École Polytechnique. She was also a member of the French macro-prudential authority, the tax advisory council, the productivity council, the Franco-German Council of Economic Experts, and the Banque de France's General Council. She also led the Centre for Economic Policy Research's European Economic Architecture Research and Policy Network, and was a non-resident fellow at Bruegel.

Her research interests focus on the international monetary system and European macroeconomic policy.

He has represented the Federal Reserve Bank on many Financial Stability Board workstreams. He was a member of the original expert group that was formed in 2010 to focus on shadow banking. He has contributed to the formulation of principles for effectively monitoring non-bank financial intermediation activities across the globe and he played an important role in compiling related regulatory guidelines.

Mr Cetorelli’s research is centred on financial markets and institutions. Over the years he has produced several significant contributions on themes including competition in banking and its role for the real economy, global banking and the transmission of monetary policy, and the evolution of financial intermediation. More recently he has been focusing on the emergence and growth of non-bank financial institutions and their links with banks. He has published extensively in scholarly journals, such as The Journal of Finance, Journal of Economic Theory, The American Economic Review and Journal of International Economics. He holds a PhD in economics from Brown University and a bachelor’s degree in economics from Sapienza University of Rome.

In his current role, he specialises in analysing macroeconomic trends, interest rates and financial markets across different asset classes, and advising institutional clients on portfolio allocation and central bank outlooks. Before taking up his current position, he worked briefly as a rates strategist at Nordea. He returned to Denmark in 2016 having held various positions at the ECB and the European Stability Mechanism in 2009-16.

He is actively involved in international fora, engaging with policymakers and chief economists from peer institutions. His main areas of research include monetary policy, fixed income markets and macroeconomic analysis, with a focus on the euro area. He holds a master's degree in mathematical economics from the University of Copenhagen.

Before joining the ECB, Mr Cipollone was Deputy Governor of the Banca d’Italia and a member of the Board of IVASS, Italy’s institute for the supervision of insurance. He was also a member of the Coordination Group for the G20 cross-border payments programme at the Bank for International Settlements. Previously, he served as an Executive Director at the World Bank Group.

Mr Cipollone is the author of several books and his papers have been published in various international journals, including The American Economic Review, Journal of the European Economic Association and Journal of Policy Modeling.

He graduated with honours in economics from the Sapienza University of Rome and went on to obtain a master’s degree in economics from Stanford University. He was also a visiting scholar in the economics department of the University of California, Berkeley.

He received his PhD in economics from Harvard University in 2000. Since then he has been Assistant Professor of Economics at New York University and Associate Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School, where he received the Apgar Award for Innovation in Teaching. He has developed macroeconomic models of technology and business cycles for policy design at the ECB and the European Commission. Additionally, he has advised and consulted for multiple governments, institutions and companies, including the governments of Malaysia and Japan, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the Danish Ministry of Higher Education and Science, Citibank and Microsoft. Models of technology diffusion developed by Mr Comin have been used by Microsoft to forecast cloud services diffusion.

He has conducted research into business cycles, technology diffusion, economic growth, structural transformations, inflation dynamics and firm volatility. His articles have been published by a range of prestigious journals, including The American Economic Review, Econometrica and American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics. He has also written three books, including Drivers of Competitiveness.

He was Spanish Minister of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness (2016-18) and Minister of Economy and Competitiveness (2011-16). He served as Secretary of State for Economic Affairs and was a member of the Economic and Financial Committee of the EU (2002-04). Prior to that, he was Secretary General for Economic and Competition Policy (2000-02) and Director General (1996-2000).

Mr de Guindos was Director of IE Business School in Madrid and the PricewaterhouseCoopers/IE Center for the Finance Sector (2010-11). He was previously Head of Financial Services at PricewaterhouseCoopers (2008-09). He was Chief Executive Officer Iberia at Lehman Brothers and Chief Executive Officer at Nomura Securities (2006-08).

He received a BSc in economics with honours from CUNEF Universidad in Spain in 1982 and qualified as State Economist and Trade Expert in 1984.

In his capacity as Executive Board member, Mr Elderson oversees the ECB’s Directorate General Legal Services.

He also co-chairs the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Risks of the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision.

Mr Elderson previously served as Executive Director of Banking Supervision at De Nederlandsche Bank, where he held several senior positions prior to joining the Governing Board in 2011. He first took up a position at the national central bank in 1999 and before that had worked as a lawyer specialising in EU competition law.

Throughout his career, Mr Elderson has stressed the importance of climate and environment-related considerations for the financial sector, as well as for supervisors and central banks. In 2016 he founded De Nederlandsche Bank’s Sustainable Finance Platform, which he also chaired until 2020, and from 2018 to 2022 he served as the first Chair of the Network of Central Banks and Supervisors for Greening the Financial System (NGFS), a network he helped to set up and expand.

Mr Elderson graduated in Dutch law from the University of Amsterdam in 1994 and obtained an LLM degree at Columbia Law School, New York, in 1995. He also took various courses at the University of Zaragoza, Spain.

After his studies in economics at the University of Saarland, he graduated from the University of St. Gallen in 1999 as a Doctor of Economics and qualified for a professorship in 2002. In 2002-06 he worked as a professor of economics, with a focus on public economics, at the University of Marburg and in 2006-10 at the University of Heidelberg. In 2017 he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Lucerne.

He is a member of Leopoldina (the German National Academy of Sciences), the Academia Europaea – The Academy of Europe, the Advisory Board of the Federal Ministry of Finance, and the German minimum wage commission. In 2011-21 he was a member and, in the last year, Chair of the German Council of Economic Experts. In 2013-21 he represented the German Council of Economic Experts in the Independent Advisory Board of the Stability Council (Germany’s fiscal council body). In 2022-24 he was a personal adviser to the German Minister of Finance.

His research interests are in the fields of public economics (macro-)economic and fiscal policy, and political and constitutional economics. He has published extensively in peer-reviewed scientific journals, such as Journal of Public Economics, European Economic Review, Economic Policy, European Journal of Political Economy, The Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, and Journal of Banking and Finance. He is the co-author of Undeclared Work, Deterrence and Social Norms: The Case of Germany (co-authored with Claus Larsen) and Demokratische Wirtschaftspolitik: Theorie und Anwendung.

He is a research fellow at the Centre for Economic Policy Research, a member of the Editorial Board of The Review of Economic Studies, and an associate editor of Journal of International Economics and Journal of Monetary Economics. He has been a visiting scholar at the ECB, the Bank of England, the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and the Banque de France. He has been awarded a Lamfalussy Fellowship and a Duisenberg Fellowship.

His research interests include international macroeconomics, monetary economics and economic growth. In 2020 he was awarded a European Research Council starting grant for a research project on economic fluctuations, productivity growth and stabilisation policies: a Keynesian growth perspective. In 2025 he was awarded a European Research Council consolidator grant for a project on macroeconomic policies for productivity growth. His research has been published in The American Economic Review, The Review of Economic Studies, Journal of the European Economic Association, Journal of International Economics and Journal of Monetary Economics.

He earned his PhD from the London School of Economics in 2013.

She holds a PhD in economics from Yale University, and was Assistant Professor of Economics at Harvard University. She also holds an honorary doctorate from Otto von Guericke University, Magdeburg. She is Director of the Macroeconomics and Growth Programme at the Centre for Economic Policy Research in London and Paris, and an elected fellow of the Econometric Society. She serves on the scientific advisory boards of the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy and the Deutsche Bundesbank, and she is a member of Leopoldina, the German National Academy of Sciences.

She is a recipient of the German Research Foundation's Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize, the most important research award in Germany. Her research addresses inequality, social mobility and growth. 

Her work focuses on the analysis of labour markets, consumption, fiscal policies and the formation of preferences. She has published in leading journals such as The American Economic Review, The Quarterly Journal of Economics, and Science.

He is also the Director of the Monetary Economics and Fluctuations programme at the Centre for Economic Policy Research and Vice-Chair of the Euro Area Business Cycle Network. He is a 2025 Duisenberg Fellow at the ECB, as well as a senior consultant to the ChaMP Research Network of the European System of Central Banks. An expert in monetary economics and financial markets, he is a frequent consultant to central banks around the world.

After graduating from TED Ankara College, he received his bachelor's degree and PhD in economics from Bilkent and Princeton Universities and worked as an economist at the Federal Reserve Board, and as a visiting professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 

She has worked at the Financial Times since 2011, covering economics and finance from Washington, D.C., London and Frankfurt, and holds a degree in philosophy and economics from the London School of Economics.

Her areas of interest include monetary policy, trade, financial markets and political economy.

Between 2011 and 2019 she served as Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund. Prior to that she served as French Minister of Economy and Finance in 2007-11, having been Trade Secretary in 2005-07. A lawyer by background, she practised for 20 years with international law firm Baker McKenzie, of which she became Global Chair in 1999. She was the first woman to hold each of these positions.

In 2019, 2020, 2022, 2023 and 2024 President Lagarde was ranked second in Forbes’ list of the most powerful women in the world. She has also been recognised by TIME as one of the 100 most influential people in the world. She was named Officer in the French Order of the Legion of Honour in April 2012 and Commander in the National Order of Merit in May 2021.

Before joining the ECB, he was Governor of the Central Bank of Ireland. He has also chaired the Advisory Scientific Committee and Advisory Technical Committee of the European Systemic Risk Board and was Whately Professor of Political Economy at Trinity College Dublin. He is also a research fellow at the Centre for Economic Policy Research.

A graduate of Trinity College Dublin, he was awarded a PhD in economics from Harvard University in 1995 and was Assistant Professor of Economics and International Affairs at Columbia University from 1995 to 1997, before returning to Dublin. In 2001 he was the inaugural recipient of the Germán Bernácer Prize for outstanding contributions to European monetary economics.

She is also a part-time professor of economics at the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice and a research affiliate at MIT Sloan and an affiliate of the Wells Fargo Advisors Center for Finance and Accounting Research at the Olin Business School, Washington University, St. Louis, United States.

She graduated from London Business School with a doctorate in finance. She was one of the coordinators of the European Finance Association (EFA) Doctoral Tutorial, a member of the EFA's Executive Committee, and a member of the BSI GAMMA Foundation Board. She has been involved in National Bureau of Economic Research and Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation projects, as well as EU projects, including in affiliation with Europlace and Inquire Europe, the Einaudi Institute of Economics and Finance, the Banque de France, the Italian Ministry of Education, the German Research Foundation and the Volkswagen Foundation. She was a member of the European Insurance and Occupational Pensions Authority’s Insurance and Reinsurance Stakeholder Group and is currently Co-Vice-Chair of the Advisory Scientific Committee of the European Systemic Risk Board, a research fellow at the Centre for Economic Policy Research, and a member of the EU's independent expert advice team in the field of banking union. She is also an external expert for the European Commission on digital currency and blockchain technology.

Her research interests are risk measurement and management, hedge funds, market microstructure, financial institutions, systemic risk, sovereign risk and financial crises.

She obtained her PhD in business economics from Harvard University and an integrated bachelor’s and master’s degree in mathematics from the University of Cambridge. She previously held the position of Assistant Professor of Finance at the University of British Columbia. She received the 2022 Fama-DFA Prize for the best asset pricing paper in Journal of Financial Economics and the 2014 Arthur Warga Award for the best paper on the topic of fixed income. She is currently an associate editor of The Review of Financial Studies and was previously an associate editor of Journal of Monetary Economics.

Her research interests focus on how inflation and monetary policy are interlinked through financial markets. One strand of her research develops models that link the riskiness of nominal Treasury bonds to stagflation risk and its fundamental drivers. A second strand of research looks at exploiting rich data sources, such as cross-sectional data of economic forecasts and the cross-section of stock prices, to understand how market participants and professional forecasters perceive the monetary policy framework and economic uncertainty. In a third strand of research, she studies the geopolitical drivers of inflation and global bond market status.

Mr Powell also serves as Chair of the Federal Open Market Committee, the Federal Reserve’s principal monetary policymaking body. He has served as a member of the Board of Governors since taking office in May 2012 to fill an unexpired term. He was reappointed to the Board in June 2014 for a term ending in January 2028.

Prior to his appointment to the Board, Mr Powell was a visiting scholar at the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington, D.C., where he focused on federal and state fiscal issues. From 1997 to 2005 he was a partner at The Carlyle Group.

Mr Powell served as Assistant Secretary and Under Secretary of the US Treasury under President George H.W. Bush, with responsibility for policy on financial institutions, the Treasury debt market and related areas. Before joining the Administration, he worked as a lawyer and investment banker in New York City.

In addition to his positions on corporate boards, Mr Powell has served on the boards of various charitable and educational institutions, including the Bendheim Center for Finance at Princeton University and the Nature Conservancy of Washington, D.C., and Maryland.

Mr Powell was born in February 1953 in Washington, D.C. He received a bachelor’s degree in politics from Princeton University in 1975 and earned a law degree from Georgetown University in 1979. While at Georgetown, he was Editor-in-Chief of the Georgetown Law Journal.

He is married with three children.

Between 2014 and 2022, he served as the Director of the Asia and Pacific Department at the International Monetary Fund. Before that, he was Chief Economist of the Asian Development Bank in 2011-14, Secretary General and Sherpa of the Presidential Committee for the 2010 G20 Seoul Summit in 2009-11, and Vice-Chairman of the Financial Services Commission in 2008-9.

Earlier in his career, he was a professor of economics at Seoul National University and an assistant professor at the University of Rochester. He holds a PhD in economics from Harvard University.

In 2011 he was awarded the Order of Civil Merit (Peony Medal) by the Government of the Republic of Korea.

She earned a PhD in economics from New York University and a master’s degree in economics from the London School of Economics. Before joining the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, she served as an assistant professor of economics at INSEAD in France and Singapore. She is an associate editor of European Economic Review and The Canadian Journal of Economics.

Her research primarily focuses on international trade, macroeconomics and international finance. Her work has appeared in leading academic journals, including Journal of Political Economy, American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, Journal of Monetary Economics, and Journal of Financial Economics.

She is on leave from the University of Bonn, where she is Professor of Financial Economics. Before joining the ECB she was a member of the German Council of Economic Experts and Co-Chair of the Franco-German Council of Economic Experts. Ms Schnabel studied economics at the universities of Mannheim, Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University and the University of California, Berkeley, and received her PhD in economics from the University of Mannheim.

He holds a bachelor's degree, a master's degree and a PhD in economics from Harvard University. A dual German-American citizen, he is a research professor at the Deutsche Bundesbank, has held short-term visiting positions at various Federal Reserve Banks and is a research fellow at the Halle Institute for Economic Research. He holds affiliations with the National Bureau of Economic Research, the Centre for Economic Policy Research, the IZA Institute of Labour Economics, and CESifo. He serves as Associate Editor of Journal of Monetary Economics and he directs the newly established Macro Labor Center for the Study of Aggregate Labor Markets, Policies, and Institutions at the University of California, Berkeley. He has been named Kavli Fellow by the National Academy of Sciences and a Sloan Research Fellow by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. He also won the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation's Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award.

His research interests include macroeconomics and labour markets from the perspective of both macroeconomic modelling and micro-empirical methods. His work often draws on large administrative datasets and novel survey data across a variety of countries. He has studied the effects of various labour market institutions and policies on worker, firm, and macroeconomic outcomes, such as payroll taxation, unemployment insurance, retirement policies, worker codetermination, collective bargaining, outsourcing, employment protection, wage misperceptions and pay transparency.

She obtained her PhD at the Institute for International Economic Studies at Stockholm University in 2007. Her research focuses on the impact of monetary and fiscal policy on wage-setting and macroeconomic performance, the behaviour of exchange rates, and the relation between institutions and long-term growth.

Prior to joining Sveriges Riksbank in 2024, she held a number of positions outside of academia. She has previously been a member of the board of the Swedish Financial Supervisory Authority, the Swedish Fiscal Policy Council, the Expert Group on Public Economics and the Scientific Advisory Council of the Swedish National Debt Office.

At Stockholm University, she was Deputy Head of the Department of Economics in 2019-24 and Deputy Director of the Centre for Monetary Policy and Financial Stability in 2021-24. She was an associate editor of the Scandinavian Journal of Economics in 2019-23.

Her international assignments include:

• International Monetary Fund cooperation in general
• International Monetary Fund cooperation between Sweden, the Netherlands, Belgium and Switzerland
• Nordic-Baltic Monetary and Financial Committee
• Financial Stability Board Regional Consultative Group for Europe

His research primarily focuses on macroeconomics, monetary policy and applied econometrics, with a particular emphasis on the transmission of monetary policy in the presence of household and firm heterogeneity.

He has held various distinguished roles, including Senior Leading Academic Consultant at the ECB and Academic Consultant for the European Commission. He has previously contributed as an academic consultant at the Bank of England and the Financial Conduct Authority.

His notable publications on monetary transmission mechanisms, household finance and fiscal policy have appeared in leading journals, such as The American Economic Review, The Review of Economic Studies and Journal of Monetary Economics. Mr Surico's work explores how heterogeneity among households and firms affects their responses to monetary and fiscal policy interventions, enhancing our understanding of macroeconomic stability and policy effectiveness. His recent research also examines the long-run effects of government expenditure on economic performance, specifically through its impacts on productivity growth and innovation.

He earned his PhD in economics from Bocconi University, a master's in economics from Universitat Pompeu Fabra, and a bachelor's degree in economics from the University of Bari. His scholarly contributions have been recognised with prestigious awards including multiple European Research Council grants, an Economic and Social Research Council grant and the Philip Leverhulme Prize from the British Academy.

He was previously Distinguished Professor of Economics at the University of California, Davis, where he held the C. Bryan Cameron Distinguished Chair in International Economics. He has also served as a senior adviser at Morgan Stanley, PIMCO and McKinsey.

He has held a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship and the Houblon-Norman and George Fellowship at the Bank of England. Jointly with Moritz Schularick, he received the Schmölders Prize for the best economic history paper. He also received the Engerman-Goldin Prize for work, with Moritz Schularick and Òscar Jordà, on creating, compiling and sharing data.

He has over 100 publications, including articles in a range of economics journals such as The American Economic Review, Econometrica, Quarterly Journal of Economics, Journal of Political Economy, and Review of Economic Studies. His books include Global Capital Markets: Integration, Crisis and Growth and Straining at the Anchor: The Argentine Currency Board and the Search for Macroeconomic Stability, 1880–1935.

He studied mathematics at the University of Cambridge and holds a PhD in economics from Harvard University.

He holds a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from the University of Tokyo (1974) and a PhD in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1980). He started his career as an assistant professor in the economics department of the University of British Columbia in 1980. In 1982 he became an associate professor at Osaka University, and in 1993 he became a professor at the University of Tokyo, specialising in macroeconomics and financial theory. In 1998-2005 he was a member of the Bank of Japan’s Policy Board, the central bank’s highest decision-making body, where he led discussions on the introduction of forward guidance under the bank’s zero interest rate policy. After completing his term as a Policy Board member, he became a professor at the Graduate School of Economics at the University of Tokyo (serving as Dean in 2005-07). In 2017 he became a professor at Kyoritsu Women’s University. He was awarded the title of Professor Emeritus from the University of Tokyo in 2017 and from Kyoritsu Women's University in 2023.

In addition to his academic roles, Mr Ueda also served as an external member of the Board of Directors of the Development Bank of Japan in 2008-23. He also chaired the Investment Committee of Japan’s Government Pension Investment Fund in 2010-14, and in 2011-12 he was President of the Japanese Economic Association.

She began her career at the Oesterreichische Nationalbank as part of the first Eurosystem research network on monetary transmission. This area has remained a central focus throughout her work. She has been involved in numerous Eurosystem-wide initiatives, contributing in both research and coordination capacities. She has held roles involving both research and policy within the Oesterreichische Nationalbank, with a sustained focus on evidence-based policy analysis.

Her areas of expertise include monetary policy strategy, transmission mechanisms, real and unintended effects of monetary policy, inflation expectations, central bank communications, banking behaviour, and macro-financial linkages. She is published in top peer-reviewed journals.

She holds a bachelor's degree in economics from Universidad de los Andes, a master’s degree and a PhD in economics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and a master’s in public administration from Harvard Kennedy School.

Previously, she was a research professor at INSEAD in Singapore and, before that, she held the Chair of International Macroeconomics at the University of Mainz. She served for a decade on the German Council of Economic Experts, advising the government on economic policy. She has regularly held advisory roles for governments and international institutions, including the European Commission, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the ECB and the Deutsche Bundesbank. More recently, she has acted as a high-level adviser to the Presidency of the European Commission, served on Switzerland’s COVID-19 economic task force, and was a member of the expert group on post-crisis financial reforms following the collapse of Credit Suisse.

In parallel to her academic and policy work, she is an experienced board member. She currently serves as an independent director at Bosch in Stuttgart and Unigestion in Geneva. Her academic research focuses on international macroeconomics, sovereign debt and currency crises, banking regulation, and the economics of climate and nature. Her current policy work focuses on the economic consequences of the second Trump Administration and on market design for nature restoration in emerging economies.