Frank Smets

Short Biography

Frank Smets is Director General of the Directorate General Research of the European Central Bank. He is professor of international economics at the Centre for Economic Studies at the KU Leuven and an honorary professor in the Duisenberg chair at the Faculty of Economics and Business of the University of Groningen. He is a Research Fellow of the Centre for Economic Policy Research in London and CESifo in Munich. He has written and published extensively on monetary, macroeconomic, financial and international issues mostly related to central banking in top academic journals such as the Journal of the European Economic Association, the American Economic Review and the Journal of Monetary Economics. He has been managing editor of the International Journal of Central Banking from 2008 till 2010. Before joining the European Central Bank in 1998, he was a research economist at the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland. He holds a PhD in Economics from Yale University.

Selected publications

Current Work in Progress

• “Downward wage rigidity and optimal monetary policy in a monetary union” (with Stefan Fahr)
• “On implications of micro price data for macro models” (with Bartosz Mackowiak)
• “Real wages and monetary policy transmission” (with Andrew McCallum)
• “The determination of wages of newly hired employees: Survey evidence on internal versus external factors” (with Kamil Galuscak, Alan Murphy, Daphne Nicolitsas, Pawel Strezelecki and Matija Vodopivec)