Biographical Background on the Economists Behind c-far: New Earnings Volatility Model Launched by NERA.

Business Editors

NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jan. 17, 2001

Jeremy C. Stein, a special consultant to NERA, a global economic consulting firm, is a Professor of Economics in the Department of Economics at Harvard University, where he teaches courses in finance in the undergraduate and PhD programs.

Before coming to Harvard in 2000, he was for ten years on the finance faculty of M.I.T.'s Sloan School of Management, most recently as the J.C. Penney Professor of Management. Prior to that, he was an Assistant Professor of Finance at the Harvard Business School from 1987-1990. He received his AB in economics summa cum laude from Princeton University in 1983 and his PhD in economics from M.I.T. in 1986. Stein was a Marvin Bower Fellow at the Harvard Business School during the academic year 1999-2000.

He spent 1989-1990 as a Senior Staff Economist on the President's Council of Economic Advisers in Washington D.C., where he specialized in issues relating to financial markets and banking. In 1987, he served as a staff member of the Presidential Task Force on Market Mechanisms (a.k.a. the Brady Commission). In 1986-1987, he worked at the investment banking firm Goldman Sachs and Co. He has done consulting or executive education work for many organizations, including Andersen Worldwide, Citicorp, IBM, Merck, Marsh&McLennan, Phillips Petroleum, ThermoElectron, and the World Bank. Stein is the author of a number of articles on finance and macroeconomics, covering such topics as: stock-market efficiency; options pricing; corporate investment and financing decisions; takeovers and highly leveraged transactions; risk management; financial intermediation and monetary policy.

He was granted a Batterymarch Research Fellowship for the academic year 1991- 1992. He is also a four-time recipient of the Sloan School's Excellence in Teaching prize, and in 1998 was elected winner of Sloan's Alumni Award for Excellence in Management Education ("Teacher of the Year"). Stein has served on the editorial boards of several leading economics journals, including the American Economic Review, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the Journal of Finance, and the Journal of Financial Economics. He is on the board of the American Finance Association, and is also a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research.

STEPHEN E. USHER

Steve Usher, a special consultant to NERA, a global economic consulting firm, received B.A. and M.A. degrees in Mathematics and Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. His areas of interest include econometrics, finance, international trade, micro-economic theory, and risk management. Dr. Usher served as a staff economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York for several years where he specialized in the German economy and international bond and money markets.

As a Teaching Fellow at the University of Michigan, Dr. Usher taught principles of economics and econometrics. He taught introductory economics courses at Rockland Community College and principles of money, banking and financial markets as adjunct faculty at SUNY. After several years as an executive in the publishing industry, Dr. Usher joined NERA, an internationally recognized firm of consulting economists, where he worked for eleven years on a wide variety of assignments with emphasis on financial issues.

He has expertise in the insurance and reinsurance industries, derivative securities, fixed income securities, securities class actions, broker dealer disputes, valuations, damage estimation, investment banking, transfer pricing, antitrust, and enterprise risk management. Dr. Usher has testified in federal court and at broker/dealer arbitrations, has submitted affidavit testimony in federal district court and before the Delaware Chancery Court and has given expert depositions. In 1999 Dr. Usher established his own consulting practice but retains an affiliation with NERA.

LOUIS A. GUTH

Lou Guth, head of the Securities and Finance Practice and a senior vice president of NERA, a global economic consulting firm, received his bachelor's degree in Economics with high honors from Harvard University and his Master's degree in Economics from the University of Pennsylvania, specializing in industrial organization. He has taught at the University of Pennsylvania and was an Assistant Professor of Economics at the Graduate School of Business Administration, New York University.

He has prepared studies on the interrelationships of market structure, advertising behavior, risk and rate of return, and has published in The Journal of Industrial Economics and Review of Economics and Statistics. He has prepared numerous reports and testimony dealing with antitrust matters concerning collusive behavior, monopoly power, reciprocity, market structure and mergers, particularly the effects of conglomerate mergers. He has prepared analyses of the competitive efforts of proposed mergers in connection with presentation to responsible governmental agencies. Mr. Guth has prepared and presented testimony dealing with economic and antitrust issues in professional sports, sports' franchises and broadcasting sports. He has prepared expert opinions based on these analyses. His work has been cited in The New York Times, Sports Illustrated, Football Digest and other sports press. Mr. Guth has served as an economic consultant to the Player Relations Committee of Major League Baseball.

Mr. Guth has also prepared reports and provided testimony concerning damages and materiality in securities litigation. He has studied the effects of alleged insider trading on stock prices and on premiums in tender offers. Mr. Guth has done substantial work in regulatory matters, including the quantification of economic demand and cost concepts and the development of policies to balance competitive and regulatory objectives. His studies included a detailed statistical analysis of costs in the stock brokerage industry and a review of proposals to modify the extent of competitions between scheduled and nonscheduled air passenger service.He has also performed an extensive analysis of the elasticity of demand for electric power of the major customer classes. He has also prepared similar reports on growth and change in the demand for, and price of, utility gas throughout each region of the United States, including analysis of Canadian gas as a market factor. He has appeared as an expert witness before the Securities and Exchange Commission, Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, Civil Aeronautics Board, Nuclear Regulatory Commission and state regulatory commissions, as well as federal courts.