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About Bent
Bent E. Sorensen is the Lay Professor in International Economics in the Business & Economics faculty at the University of Houston, Department of Economics. He earned his Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Copenhagen in 1990 and his Cand. Polit. (M.A. equivalent) in Economics from the same institution in 1985. Sorensen's academic interests center on macroeconomics, econometrics, international finance, consumption, risk sharing, financial integration, firm-level data, and inequality. His research explores firm dependence on domestic banks during recessions, optimal allocations to heterogeneous agents, productivity gains from foreign investment, and channels of risk sharing in economic unions like the Eurozone.
Sorensen's career includes prior appointments as Professor of Economics at Binghamton University (2001–2003), Senior Economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City (1999–2001), and Assistant Professor at Brown University (1991–1999). He is a Fellow of the CEPR Programme in International Macroeconomics since 1999, received the Economic Journal Referee Prize in 2010, and served as Research Fellow at the FDIC (2009) and EU Commission DG ECFIN (2014–2015). He has been Visiting Scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland (2011–2018) and Boston (2015–2024), and Consultant for the World Bank (2023–2024). Sorensen has published extensively in top journals, including "How to Construct Nationally Representative Firm Level Data from the Orbis Global Database: New Facts and Aggregate Implications" (American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, 2024, with Sebnem Kalemli-Ozcan et al.), "Quantifying Productivity Gains from Foreign Investment" (Journal of International Economics, 2021), "Channels of Risk Sharing in the Eurozone: What Can Banking and Capital Market Union Achieve?" (IMF Economic Review, 2019, with Mathias Hoffmann et al.), "Deep Financial Integration and Volatility" (Journal of the European Economic Association, 2014), and "Interaction Effects in Econometrics" (Empirical Economics, 2013, with Hatice Ozer-Balli). His contributions also feature book chapters such as "Misallocation, Property Rights, and Access to Finance: Evidence from Within and Across Africa" (African Successes: Modernization and Development, University of Chicago Press, 2016). Sorensen's work has advanced insights into macroeconomic policy, financial crises, and international risk sharing.