Background
Quah was born in Penang, Malaysia, and attended the Penang Free School before leaving for university studies in the United States.
柯成兴
economist university professor
Quah was born in Penang, Malaysia, and attended the Penang Free School before leaving for university studies in the United States.
Quah obtained his Doctor of Philosophy from Harvard University under Thomas Sargent in 1986 and his Bachelor of Arts from Princeton University in 1980.
Quah"s work includes contributions to the fields of economic growth, development economics, monetary economics, macroeconometrics, and the weightless economy. Quah is known for his research on estimation techniques for disentangling the effects of different disturbances on economies, for his studies on economic growth and convergence across nation states, and for his analyses of the large shifts in the global economy. He worked as assistant professor of economics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology before joining the Economics Department at London School of Economics in 1991.
Quah was, for 2006–2009, Head of the Economics Department at the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Quah has served previously as Council Member on Malaysia"s National Economic Advisory Council and as Consultant for the Bank of England, the World Bank, and the Monetary Authority of Singapore. Currently, he is on the advisory board of OMFIF where he is regularly involved in meetings regarding the financial and monetary system.Quah has also worked as visiting assistant professor of economics at Harvard University, and visiting Professor of Economics at Tsinghua University School of Economics and Management and at the Nanyang Technological University of Singapore.
Google Scholar Citations reports that Quah"s most-cited works include his 1989 paper on Vector Autoregressions with Olivier Blanchard and his papers on poverty traps in cross-country economic growth and the convergence of Twin Peaked income distributions. His published academic writings range widely from his prize-winning 2011 paper on the shifting global economy - mapping the eastwards movement in the world"s economic center of gravity away from its 1980s mid-Atlantic location - to work while still a graduate student on the appendix to the famous Monetarist paper "Some Unpleasant Monetarist Arithmetic" (by Thomas Sargent and Neil Wallace).
Quah calls The Great Shift East the move in the world"s economic center of gravity out of the mid-Atlantic location where it had been for most of the 19th and 20th centuries, pulled by the rise of economies in the east.
Between 1980 and 2010 that economic center of gravity moved 5,000 km east, to the Persian Gulf, on a trajectory that continues to take it towards the boundary between India and China. Although the early part of his career saw close attention to technical developments in timeseries econometrics, Quah became heavily influenced by the approach to communicating ideas exemplified in the work of Edward Tufte, and sought similar dissemination of his research to a wider audience. Quah"s TED talks include "Global Tensions From a Rising East" (March 2012) and "Economics, Democracy, and the New World Order" (August 2014).
Quah"s publications listing page at the London School of Economics.
Member Economics Society, American Economics Association, Royal Economics Society.
Married Kathleen Tyson, April 10, 1993. Children: Carter Tyson, Mason Tyson.