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Ulrich Kohli
Visiting Professor, University of Geneva

Biographical Note

Ulrich Kohli was born in Zurich, Switzerland, in 1948, and he grew up in the French speaking Canton of Vaud. He holds a licence ès sciences économiques from the University of Lausanne (1971), an M.A. in Economics from Queen’s University in Kingston (1972), and a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of British Columbia (1976). He has been an economist at the Bank of Canada in Ottawa (1975-1977), an assistant professor at the University of Lausanne (1977-1979), a senior lecturer at the University of Sydney (1979-1981), an associate professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder (1981-1983), and an economic adviser at the Swiss National Bank in Zurich (1983-1985). From 1985 to 2001, he was a full professor at the University of Geneva and he chaired its Economics Department from 1997 to 2001. In 2001 Ulrich Kohli was appointed Chief Economist and Alternate Member of the Governing Board of the Swiss National Bank (Switzerland's central bank) by the Swiss federal government, a position he kept until the end of 2009. In January 2010 he returned to the University of Geneva as a visiting professor. He has been a visitor at the Reserve Bank of Australia (1980 and 1983), the University of British Columbia (1988), the University of Colorado at Boulder (1990, 1991-1992, and 1994), the Bank of Tanzania Training Institute (1994, 1995, 1997, and 2001), and the State Bank of Vietnam Training Center (1996, 1998, 1999, and 2000). Ulrich Kohli has published over seventy articles in refereed journals in the areas of international trade, aggregate production theory, economic growth, monetary economics, and macroeconomics. He is the author of Technology, Duality, and Foreign Trade: The GNP Function Approach to Modeling Imports and Exports and of Analyse macroéconomique. He has been awarded the Harry Johnson Prize (1979) by the Canadian Economics Association and the National Latsis Prize (1986) by the Swiss National Science Foundation. He has been a member of a number of government commissions and working parties on various issues such as social security, monetary policy, foreign policy and international migration, in Switzerland and elsewhere, and he has served on the executive committee of the Swiss Society of Economics and Statistics, on the National Research Council of the Swiss National Science Foundation, on the Standing Committee for the Social Sciences of the European Science Foundation, and on the Swiss Federal Commission on Economic Activity which he chaired in 2001. Ulrich Kohli is the father of two adult daughters. He enjoys sailing, skiing, hiking, and bicycling.

Publications