Personal

Well, you must have some time on your hands if you made it this far. At right are some photos going back to high school (click on a picture to see a larger version). If you really have a lot of time on your hands, there are links to some more photos below.

I grew up in Bethesda, MD, a suburb of Washington, DC. The Montgomery County Public School system is excellent, and I received a good education there. Many of my closest friends today date back to elementary and high school, and to our neighborhood swim team, Wildwood Manor, which I swam on every summer from the age of 6.

At Walter Johnson High School, I was on the swim team, studied piano, captained the math team, and competed for Montgomery County's ARML Math Team. I had always intended to go into research as a career, and so I got a job as an intern in a pharmacology lab at the National Institutes of Health, but decided that there was too much trial and error and not enough theory in biology for my tastes, and so I began gravitating more and more toward math and astrophysics.

At Williams College, I studied math and physics, and interned for two summers at the solar physics branch of the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, DC. However, I enjoyed my math courses the most and went on to major exclusively in mathematics. I was accepted into the Ph.D. program in the Stanford Mathematics Department, but continued to take courses in other fields, and during second semester of senior year, I took Intermediate Macroeconomics.

I loved the general equilibrium nature of macroeconomics, and the novelty and freshness of economics as a whole (relative to math and physics), and so I immediately began considering macroeconomics as a possible research career. I spent the summer after college (after cycling through Europe with several friends from high school) reading through economics research journals to see if the field was scientific enough to be worth switching into, and decided that it was. Thus, after arriving at Stanford, I began taking economics courses on top of the first-year graduate sequence in math. I applied and was admitted to the Stanford Economics Department, where my major subfields included Macroeconomics, International Economics, Econometrics, and Labor Economics. I was particularly interested in the macroeconomic effects of individual and industrial sector shifts, and wrote my dissertation on “Individual and Sectoral Heterogeneity, Reallocation, and Aggregate Fluctuations.”

After finishing my Ph.D., I took a job with the Monetary Affairs Division of the Federal Reserve Board, doing basic research in Macro and Monetary Economics. I bought a small townhouse in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Washington, DC, and a few years later met my wife, Hyun.

At the Board, my research began to focus increasingly on Monetary Economics and Macro-Finance, the relationship between financial markets and the macroeconomy. I also had much better success publishing in these areas than in the sectoral shifts area. I spent one semester on partial leave to teach first-year graduate macroeconomics in Charlottesville at the University of Virginia, and a second semester teaching intermediate macroeconomics at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

Hyun and I welcomed our first child, Andrew, in 2002, and daughter, Julia, in 2004. We were still living in the same small townhouse on Capitol Hill, however, so in 2005 we began looking into our options for moving. I ended up taking a job in the Research Department of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. We bought a house in Walnut Creek, California and packed up the family and moved to the West Coast in the summer of 2005.

Hyun initially quit her job with The AES Corporation benefits group when we left the DC area, but a few months later ended up working for them from our home on an ongoing basis. At the San Francisco Fed, my research has continued to shift toward Macro-Finance, although I've been doing more theoretical Macro-Finance modeling lately, rather than the high-frequency empirical analysis that characterized most of my research at the Board.

In Walnut Creek, Andrew and Julia are attending a private elementary school near our house, The Dorris-Eaton School—although the public schools in Walnut Creek are very good relative to California, they lag far behind the quality of those in Montgomery County, where I grew up. As of the beginning of 2011, Andrew is in third grade and Julia in first. Andrew's interests include Nintendo Wii and DSi video games, math, astronomy, chess, tennis, baseball, soccer, skiing, and swimming. Julia's interests include Nintendo Wii and DSi video games, art, Rainbow Fairies, Littlest Pet Shop, piano, gymnastics, skiing, and swimming.

Hyun quit her job with AES in 2010 in order to have more time for the kids and to improve her skills in computer systems, the part of the job she enjoyed the most. She's been taking computer hardware and programming classes at Diablo Valley College, which she enjoys a lot. Hyun's outside interests include playing tennis, reading, playing with her new iPad, and shopping.

When I'm not doing work or playing with the kids (which together take up about 105% of my time), I like to swim, run, read, listen to music, and work in the garden. I dislike watching TV, and almost never do it—in fact, we don't subscribe to cable and view whatever television we do watch online.

If you're interested in seeing more photos, click on the link below. Although I've updated the text on this page, I haven't uploaded any new photos as of yet, but I hope to do so over the course of the next few weeks.

(More Family Photos)