Peter Henry

Peter Henry’s research on emerging markets provides fundamental insights about the impact of economic reform on the lives of people in developing countries. It uses theory and data to grapple objectively with some of the most important and contentious economic questions of our time: Does debt relief help or hurt poor countries? Should emerging nations permit capital to flow freely in and out of their economies? Is it possible to reduce inflation without undermining economic growth? Peter’s answers to these questions appear in the leading academic journals and have led him to testify before the U.S. Congress and various United Nations Ambassadors.

Peter is Konosuke Matsushita Professor of International Economics, the John and Cynthia Fry Gunn Faculty Scholar, and Associate Director of the Center for Global Business and the Economy at the Stanford University Graduate School of Business. He is also a Senior Fellow of the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, a Nonresident Senior Fellow of the Brookings Institution, and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. From 2000-2001 he was a National Fellow at the Hoover Institution. The National Science Foundation’s Early CAREER Development Program supported his research and teaching from 2001-2006. In 2004 Peter participated in the Copenhagen Consensus, an international conference on how to make the most efficient use of the world’s scarcest resources. The Economist magazine named the published proceedings of the conference one of the best business books of 2004.

Peter received his PhD in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1997. While in graduate school, he served as a consultant to the Governors of the Bank of Jamaica and the Eastern Caribbean Central Bank (ECCB). His research at the ECCB contributed to the intellectual foundation for establishing the first stock market in the Eastern Caribbean Currency Area.

Prior to attending MIT, Peter was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University where he received a BA in mathematics and a Full Blue in basketball. He also holds a BA in economics from The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where he was a Morehead Scholar, a National Merit Scholar, a member of Phi Beta Kappa, a Marshall Scholar-Elect, a reserve wide receiver on the varsity football team, and a finalist in the 1991 campus-wide slam-dunk competition.

Born in Jamaica, Peter became a U.S. citizen in 1986. His wife, Lisa J. Nelson, received her BA and MD from Yale University. She is a child psychiatrist and was a Glaxo Welcome Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association from 1995 to 1997. They have four sons: Christian Blair, Langston Alexander, Hayden Montgomery, and Harrison Elbert.