Jerry Dwyer’s central banking, economics acumen has no borders

When Jerry Dwyer isn’t teaching or researching in the John E. Walker Department of Economics at Clemson University, the professor and BB&T Scholar is sharing his knowledge of banking and economics well beyond the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Dwyer, an internationally recognized expert in central bank operations, has been called upon to share that expertise in such far away locations as Australia, Tunisia, Albania and Spain, to name a few.

Most recently, his banking acumen was sought in the vicinity of another well-known mountain range in South America, the Andes, where the Colombian and Peruvian governments sought the College of Business professor’s expertise on innovating the operations of their central banks. Dwyer’s consultation services to those banks came by way of the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva, Switzerland.

“The Swiss government provides the institute funding to assist foreign banks,” said Dwyer who has a connection to the institute through a former graduate student he supervised at the University of Carlos III in Madrid. “I spent two weeks in Colombia and Peru consulting the banks in a variety of ways that affect their operations and making recommendations establishing a five-year plan toward that end.”

Two areas he addressed involved innovating the banks’ economic forecasting processes.

“One area the banks sought help in was creating quarterly gross domestic product forecasts before a quarter ends,” Dwyer said. “Essentially, it’s predicting what the GDP growth is for a given quarter before that quarter ends. That kind of immediacy in the forecast is important to a central bank. Many members of the public also find it informative.”

Beyond his extensive research on banking, Dwyer brings a wealth of knowledge on that subject through his real-world experience at the Atlanta Federal Reserve. He taught at Clemson for 10 years before leaving for a high-level position at the Atlanta Fed for 15 years. He then returned to Clemson as a professor of economics in 2013.

“I was a vice president and a finance team leader at the Atlanta Fed. My group’s charge was interpreting the financial markets, and we also had a role in dealing with the financial crisis about 10 years ago,” he said. It was at the Fed where Dwyer started its Center for Financial Innovation and Stability.

Combined with his extensive research on international banking and monetary economics and first-hand knowledge of the U.S. central banking system, Dwyer makes for a sought-after source on central banking issues. He tapped both sources of knowledge in helping the Colombian and Peruvian banks on another issue that involved forecasts.

“The banks wanted to improve their longer-range forecasts also,” he said. “By using state of the art economic and statistical tools, a central bank can make forecasts that help them better determine what monetary policy should be.”

Beyond the international consulting, Dwyer also shares his knowledge of economics in academia abroad. He has served as a visiting scholar at the University of Cambridge as well as adjunct faculty member at Trinity College in Dublin and the University of Carlos III in Madrid, Spain. He also has been a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Banks of Atlanta, St. Louis and Minneapolis and an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute.

In recent years, Dwyer has become a go-to scholar on cryptocurrencies with several foreign governments. Dwyer said his work abroad brings short and long-term benefits to Clemson.

“It’s good for the university and the College of Business because both brands are exposed to an area where we wouldn’t otherwise have a presence. Long term, opportunities result when relationships are built with counterparts in the academic and banking communities on other continents.”

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