Event details

Princeton University ID holders and invited guests. Livestream open to the public on MediaCentral.

A conversation between Prof. Atif Mian, and Dr. Reza Baqir, former Governor, State Bank of Pakistan and Senior Fellow, Harvard University.

Dr. Reza Baqir is a Managing Director with Alvarez & Marsal and Global Practice Leader of A&M’s Sovereign Advisory Services in Dubai. Dr. Baqir brings more than 25 years of experience in global sovereign work. He has advised numerous countries’ governments and central banks to promote macroeconomic stability and sustainable growth and manage economic crises. Prior to joining A&M, Dr. Baqir was the Governor of Pakistan’s central bank, the State Bank of Pakistan. There he negotiated a new IMF program in June 2019, successfully completed six subsequent reviews, and led the country’s financial response during the Covid-19 pandemic. Dr. Baqir’s other reforms include the liberalization of Pakistan’s foreign exchange market from a fixed to a flexible regime, revision of the central bank law to strengthen its independence, and several digitization initiatives to promote efficiency and inclusion in the financial sector. Previously, Dr. Baqir spent 19 years with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and two years with the World Bank. He headed the IMF's Debt Policy Division, which oversees IMF’s work on sovereign debt related polices including sovereign debt restructuring, debt sustainability analyses, and related areas. He worked on debt restructurings in Greece, Jamaica, Ukraine and led the IMF delegation to the Paris Club for four years. In addition to sovereign debt work, Dr. Baqir started and headed the IMF’s office in Egypt as Senior Resident Representative and oversaw the successful implementation of the IMF’s largest loan in the Middle East. He was IMF Mission Chief for Romania and Bulgaria, Deputy Chief of the Emerging Markets Division, and IMF Resident Representative in the Philippines. Dr. Baqir earned a bachelor’s degree (magna cum laude) in economics from Harvard University and a Ph.D. in economics from the University of California at Berkeley. He is a Senior Fellow at Harvard Kennedy School working in areas related to sovereign debt at the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government. His views on emerging markets’ economic challenges and sovereign debt have been covered frequently in the Financial Times, Bloomberg, Reuters, CNN, and CNBC.

Atif Mian is John H. Laporte, Jr. Class of 1967 Professor of Economics, Public Policy and Finance at Princeton University, and Director of the Julis-Rabinowitz Center for Public Policy and Finance at the Woodrow Wilson School. He holds a bachelors degree in Mathematics with Computer Science and Ph.D. in Economics from MIT. Prior to joining Princeton in 2012 he taught at the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Chicago Booth School of business. Professor Mian's work studies the connections between finance and the macro economy. His latest book, House of Debt, with Amir Sufi builds upon powerful new data to describe how debt precipitated the Great Recession. The book explains why debt continues to threaten the global economy, and what needs to be done to fix the financial system. House of Debt is critically acclaimed by The New York Times, Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal,The Economist, and The Atlantic among others. Professor Mian's research has appeared in top academic journals, including the American Economic Review, Econometrica, Quarterly Journal of Economics, Journal of Finance, Review of Financial Studies and Journal of Financial Economics.