Rowena Pecchenino

Rowena Pecchenino is Professor of Economics in the Department of Economics at NUI Maynooth (Maynooth University). After graduating from Cornell University with a BA in Economics in 1981, Pecchenino pursued her academic career, first at the London School of Economics, where she received an MSc in Economics in 1982, and then at the University of Wisconsin, where she received a PhD in Economics in 1985. In 1985 she was appointed assistant professor at Michigan State University, and was promoted to professor in 1997, becoming Department Chair in 2001, a post she held for five years. In 2007 she was became Professor and Head of the Department of Economics, Finance & Accounting at NUI Maynooth and two years later took on the additional role as Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences at NUI Maynooth.  She has since stepped down from both administrative roles. Among other visiting posts, she was a Visiting Fellow at ICER in Turin in 1994 and 1997, a visiting Fellow at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis from 1995-1999, a Visiting Professor at UCD in 2001, a Fulbright Senior Specialist at CERGE-EI in Prague in 2005, and a Visiting Professor at the Geary Institute, UCD in 2006-2007. She was a long-serving member of the board of the Irish Research Council, and is now a member of the ESRI Council and Chair of Scholars at Risk Network - Ireland.  She has published and continues to conduct research in a number of distinct fields in economics including theoretical and empirical macroeconomics, the microeconomics and macroeconomics of banking and financial institutions, growth theory, defence economics, environmental economics, health economics, behavioural economics, labour economics, the economics of aging, economic history, the philosophy of economics, and the conjunction of economics and theology. Her recent work explores hope and despair in economic thought. She has published widely in journals such as the American Economic Review, the Economic Journal, the Journal of Public Economics, and the Scandinavian Journal of Economics.