Professor Leeper's research and teaching interests center on macroeconomics and monetary economics, with a special emphasis on monetary and fiscal policy analysis. One line of his research explores the theoretical and empirical implications of the dynamic interactions between monetary and fiscal policy. Another line studies empirical aspects of policy. Much of his research employs formal stochastic general equilibrium models and/or informal supply and demand analysis to interpret economic time series. Recent work explores the implications of recurring changes in policy regime in the context of dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models.
Before joining the IU faculty, Leeper spent four years in the research department at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta and four years in the international finance division of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System in Washington, D.C. Leeper's research has been published in The American Economic Review, The Journal of Political Economy, The Journal of Monetary Economics, Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, the NBER Macroeconomics Annual, the Carnegie-Rochester Conference Series on Public Policy, and a variety of other refereed journals.
Leeper is a regular visitor to Federal Reserve and other central banks and serves as an external advisor to the Sveriges Riksbank (Swedish central bank). He is a Research Associate with the National Bureau of Economic Research and director of the Center for Applied Economics and Policy Research at Indiana University. He was born in Isfahan, Iran, and spent his school-age years in Taiwan, Malaysia, Seattle, Hong Kong, and Northern Virginia.