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Loretta Mester is a senior vice president and director of research at the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, which she joined in 1985. Mester heads a staff of economists and analysts who conduct research on macroeconomics, banking, payments, finance, and the regional economy. As director of research, she attends the meetings of the Federal Open Market Committee in Washington, D.C. with the Bank’s president and makes regular presentations on the economy to the Bank’s Board of Directors.
Mester is also an adjunct professor of finance at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, and a Fellow in the Wharton Financial Institutions Center. She has taught in the undergraduate and MBA programs of the Finance Department at Wharton and in the Ph.D. program of the Finance Department at New York University.
Mester's research interests include the organizational structure and production efficiency of financial institutions, the theory of financial intermediation, and agency problems and regulatory issues in banking. She is an editor of the Journal of Banking and Finance and an associate editor of the Journal of Financial Intermediation; Journal of Money, Credit, and Banking; Journal of Financial Services Research; Journal of Economics and Business; Research in Banking and Finance; and Journal of Financial Stability. Mester is a founding member and director of the Financial Intermediation Research Society and a member of the American Economic Association and its Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession, the American Finance Association, the Financial Management Association, and the Econometric Society.
Mester earned a B.A. in mathematics and economics summa cum laude from Barnard College of Columbia University and an M.A. and a Ph.D. in economics from Princeton University, where she held a National Science Foundation Fellowship. | 