William Gavin, vice president and economist in the research department of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, is scheduled to speak at 6 p.m. this Wednesday, Oct. 27, at Corwin Pavilion at UCSB on “The Zero Lower Bound: Avoidance and Escape.”

A reception will begin at 5 p.m. on the patio overlooking the lagoon outside the pavilion. The presentation is sponsored by UCSB’s Laboratory for Aggregate Economics and Finance.

Gavin will discuss why the federal funds interest rate target is set at zero — the lower bound on market interest rates — and why it is a trap. He will suggest how policies can be modified to avoid hitting the zero lower bound, and how implementing such modifications might help to escape a zero lower bound.

Gavin participates in management, serves as editor-in-chief of Review, the Federal Reserve Bank’s economic research journal, and conducts economic research.

He is studying the interaction between monetary policy and the market for risky debt. His work, which appears in a wide variety of academic, business and Federal Reserve System publications, is centered on both theoretical and statistical analysis of U.S. monetary policy. His work uses computational techniques to evaluate policy in complex and uncertain environments.

Gavin is a member of the National Association for Business Economics, the Society for Economic Dynamics and the American Economic Association. He has served as an adjunct professor of economics at Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland State University and Washington University in St. Louis.

Gavin received his doctorate in economics from The Ohio State University, and began his career with the Federal Reserve System as an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland in 1980. He managed the Cleveland Research Department’s macroeconomics section from 1988 through April 1994, when he joined the St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank.

The Laboratory for Aggregate Economics and Finance at UCSB was established in 2005 to address important questions on growth and fluctuations in national economies. Under the direction of Nobel Prize-winning economist Finn Kydland, the Jeffrey Henley professor of economics, the laboratory identifies timely economic questions, issues, and anomalies that may be addressed in a conference workshop setting.

The laboratory also serves as an environment in which resident and visiting scholars can conduct topical research in quantitative aggregate theory.

— Noozhawk business writer Ray Estrada can be reached at restrada@noozhawk.com. Follow Noozhawk on Twitter: @noozhawk or @NoozhawkNews. Become a fan of Noozhawk on Facebook.