Annual AP Economics Conference, 2017 Speakers
Michael Owyang is an assistant vice president at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. His principal research interests are time series econometrics, Markov switching, and Bayesian econometrics. Owyang received his Bachelor of Arts in economics and Bachelor of Science in mechanical engineering from the University of California, Berkeley in 1992. He also received his master’s and Ph.D. in economics from the University of California, San Diego in 1996 and 2000, respectively. He joined the St. Louis Fed in 2000.
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Peggy Pride served as the AP economics teacher at St. Louis University High School in St. Louis, Mo., from 1992 until her retirement in 2008. Pride served on the Test Development Committee for AP economics from 1999 through 2004 and was the micro question leader at the annual reading for four years. She previously served as table leader. Pride has presented at Council for Economic Education (CEE) and at the annual AP conference. She travels the Midwest as an AP consultant and has written curricula for the College Board, CEE and Junior Achievement. She was the primary author of the College Board publication “AP Economics Teacher’s Guide” (2004). Pride was awarded the Global Association of Teachers of Economics' Teacher of the Year award in 2006. She writes and edits curricula for economics textbooks and was the senior editor for the teacher’s guides for "Explorations in Economics" (2012) and the second edition of "Krugman's Economics for AP" (2015). She earned her bachelor’s degree in history and economics and her master’s degree in business education at Southern Illinois University in Edwardsville, Ill.
Fred Smith teaches introductory, public and urban economics, intermediate microeconomics and American economic history at Davidson College in North Carolina. His research lies at the intersection of the fields of urban economics and American economic history, and his most recent research (co-authored with Jason Barr of Rutgers University) looks at how the urban spatial structure of New York has evolved over time. Smith attended his first AP economics reading in the summer of 2002, and he has been involved with AP program ever since. He is currently the chief reader of AP macroeconomics. Smith has a bachelor’s degree from Kenyon College in Ohio, a master’s degree from the University of Delaware and a Ph.D. from Vanderbilt University, all in economics. He started teaching at Davidson in the fall of 2000.
Dan Thornton is president of D.L. Thornton Economics. He was vice president and economic adviser at the St. Louis Fed before retiring in August 2014. Prior to joining the St. Louis Fed in 1981, Thornton was an associate professor of economics at Central Michigan University. Thornton received his doctorate in economics from the University of Missouri, Columbia and a Master of Science degree in economics from Arizona State University. He has published widely in leading economics and finance journals such as the Review of Economics and Statistics; the Journal of Money, Credit, and Banking; the Journal of Financial Economics; and the Review of Financial Studies. He is an associate editor of Applied Economics Letters and Applied Financial Economics; a research fellow at the Centre for Finance and Credit Markets; a member of the Central Bank Communication Network; and a member of the advisory board of the International Centre for Banking and Corporate Governance. He is also a member of the board of the St. Louis Council on Economic Education and a trustee of the Missouri Council on Economic Education.
Guillaume Vandenbroucke is a research officer in the Research division at the St. Louis Fed. He is also a lecturer in economics at Washington University in St. Louis. Vandenbroucke received a doctorate in economics from the University of Rochester in 2004. Before joining the Bank in 2014, he was on the faculty of the economics departments at the University of Southern California and the University of Iowa. He has also been a visiting professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s department of economics. One line of Vandenbroucke’s research focuses on family economics, including the economic causes and consequences of fertility and marriage decisions. Another line of research focuses on education and its connection with income inequality between individuals and countries.
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Sandra Wright has been teaching AP macroeconomics and AP microeconomics since 1999 at Adlai E. Stevenson High School in Lincolnshire, Ill. She first started as an AP reader in 2001, moving between the economic subject tests until 2011 when she moved officially to AP microeconomics. She has served as a table leader for both the micro and macro exams. She has been on the AP Microeconomics Test Development Committee since 2010, serving as a high school committee member and later as the College Board adviser. She has contributed to CEE and Bade & Parkin AP economics instructor manuals and student resources. Wright is the former president of the Global Association for Teaching Economics and former Teacher Advisory Committee chair for CEE. Wright received a doctorate in educational leadership and policy from Loyola University Chicago, a master’s of secondary education in curriculum and instruction from Northern Illinois University and a bachelor’s of economics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
