Dan Alpert.

Daniel Alpert, a leading author and commentator on economic policy, will join Cornell Law School as a senior fellow in financial macroeconomics and an adjunct professor of law. Alpert will work within the Clarke Program on the Law and Regulation of Financial Institutions and Markets, part of the Jack G. Clarke Business Law Institute.

Alpert is a founding managing partner of Westwood Capital, LLC, and its affiliates. He has more than thirty-five years of international merchant banking and investment banking experience, including a wide variety of workout and bankruptcy-related restructuring transactions. A pioneer in securitizations and other innovative financing techniques since the 1980s, Alpert has, in the past decade, also come to be increasingly relied upon by legislators, the White House, regulators, and the media to explain and advise upon complex financial matters that even well-educated laypersons have difficulty understanding. He has been widely quoted in print outlets including The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, the Reuters, AP and Bloomberg wires, Forbes, and Fortune. He is a frequent guest commentator on the principal business news networks — Bloomberg, CNBC, and Fox Business News — and also appears on CNNI and the BBC.

Since the financial crisis that erupted in 2008, Alpert has become a widely sought and cited author on economic policy. His coauthored The Way Forward, written with Edward Cornell Professor of Law Robert Hockett and NYU Economics Professor Nouriel Roubini for the New America Foundation in 2011, received much attention from members of the U.S. Congress as well as from The New York Times, The Atlantic, Foreign Affairs, NPR, and other media. His 2013 book, The Age of Oversupply: Overcoming the Greatest Challenge to the Global Economy, is cited as one of the best diagnoses of the world’s economic ills in the new millennium. His 2016 white paper for Third Way, entitled GLUT: The U.S. Economy and the American Worker in the Age of Oversupply, explained the connection between global imbalances and the U.S. employment situation. And his co-authored paper The Debt Goes On, written with Professor Hockett for the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis and published in Challenge late last year, is widely viewed as the most comprehensive update of the nation’s private debt challenges since the end of the last crisis. Alpert is also a founder of the World Economic Roundtable, a fellow of The Century Foundation, and a member of the Economic Club of New York.

Robert Hockett, codirector of the Clarke Program on the Law and Regulation of Financial Institutions and Markets, says that “with the coming of Dan Alpert to Cornell, several great ‘brands’ at the intersection of law, finance, and macroeconomics join forces. The combination of practical knowledge and theoretic sophistication available at Cornell is now unsurpassed.”

In this new partnership, Alpert will work closely with Hockett and other members of the program-Co-Director and Professor of Law Saule Omarova, Senior Fellow Paul McCulley, and Research Fellow Rohan Grey — in conducting research and producing scholarship on both national and global financial and monetary matters. Alpert and Hockett will also offer a new seminar at the Law School next autumn.

“I am honored to join my esteemed friend and writing-partner, Bob Hockett, and Professor Omarova to further the work of the Clarke Program, alongside the brilliant Paul McCulley,” says Alpert. “Cornell’s unique commitment to research and study at the intersection of law, finance, and economics is enormously important as it addresses all of the most pressing political and socioeconomic concerns of our day-complex global marketplaces, imbalances between recently emerging economies and slow-growing developed nations, and rising economic inequality in the latter, even as global inequalities recede.”