Each year, the International Economics Section (IES) at Princeton University invites a member of the international economics community to deliver the prestigious Frank D. Graham Memorial Lecture. This year on April 3, London Business School Professor Hélène Rey delivered the 70th annual Graham Lecture titled “The Global Financial Cycle.”

About Rey

Hélène Rey is the Lord Bagri Professor of Economics at London Business School.

Professor Rey’s research focuses on the determinants and consequences of external trade and financial imbalances, the theory and empirics of financial crises and the organization of the international monetary system. She demonstrated in particular that countries’s gross external asset positions help predict current account adjustments and the exchange rate. She introduced the concept of Global Financial Cycles and qualified the idea of the Mundellian Trilemma. She was awarded an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, the 2006 Bernácer Prize and the 2012 inaugural Birgit Grodal Award of the European Economic Association. In 2013 she received the Yrjö Jahnsson Award shared with Thomas Piketty, in 2014, the Inaugural Carl Menger Preis, the 2015 Prix Edouard Bonnefous, the 2017 Maurice Allais Prize and the 2020 Prix Turgot.

Professor Rey is an elected Fellow of the British Academy, of the Econometric Society, of the European Economic Association, of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences,  a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Economic Association, a correspondent of the Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques. She was made O.B.E for services to economics. Economic Analysis of Development (BREAD).

Professor Rey was on the board of the Review of Economic Studies (2008-2015), an associate editor of the AEJ: Macroeconomics Journal. She is a co-editor of the Annual Review of Economics, a Research Fellow and Vice President of CEPR and an NBER Research Associate. She is a member of the Group of Thirty, of the Bellagio Group on the international economy and a member of the external advisory group to the managing director of the IMF. She is a member of the Haut Conseil de Stabilité Financière (French Macro Prudential Authority). She was a member of the Conseil d’Analyse Economique until 2012 and on the Board of the Autorité de Contrôle Prudentiel et de Résolution (2010-2014). She writes a regular column for the French newspaper Les Echos. Hélène Rey received her undergraduate degree from ENSAE, a Master in Engineering Economic Systems from Stanford University and her PhDs from the London School of Economics and the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales.

Until 2007, she was at Princeton University, as Professor of Economics and International Affairs in the Economics Department and the School for Public and International Affairs (SPIA).

About the Graham Lecture

Frank Graham was a Princeton professor from 1921 to 1949 and the second Walker Professor of Economics and International Finance. Professor Graham published widely on international trade and international monetary issues.

After his untimely death in 1949, the lecture was established by his friends inside and outside the department to honor his memory. It is the signature event of the International Economics Section and has been delivered over the years by a veritable Who’s Who in International Economics, including ten Nobel Laureates.

A complete list of previous Graham Lecturers can be found here.