Laurence Ball is Professor of Economics at Johns Hopkins University. He is a research associate for the National Bureau of Economic Research and has been a visiting scholar at the Central Bank of Norway and the Reserve Bank of Australia. His academic honors include the Houblon-Norman Fellowship (Bank of England), a Professional Fellowship in Monetary Economics (Victoria University of Wellington and Reserve Bank of New Zealand), the NBER Olin Fellowship, and the Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship.