Williston Northampton’s AP Microeconomics class will host Steven R. Cunningham, the director of research and education at the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER) on Friday, May 4.

Cunningham will speak about the monetary policy and the Federal Reserve; bank reserves, the monetary base, multipliers, and the money supply; and how money is related to inflation.  He will also speak about inflation indexes and AIER’s Everyday Price Index (EPI).

AIER created the EPI to, “address the widespread perception that the Consumer Price Index (CPI) does not reflect the day-to-day experience of Americans.”

Cunningham, the director of research and education, is also an emeritus professor in the department of economics at the University of Connecticut (UConn), where he was a member of the graduate faculty for over 20 years. At UConn, he founded and was the first director of the Connecticut Center for Economic Analysis.

He served as president of Cunningham Systems Corporation; research assistant to the vice chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System; manager of corporate revenue, gross profit, and pricing at AT&T Paradyne Corporation; staff mathematician and senior engineer at Harris Corporation; and senior scientist at ENSCO, Inc. At the University of South Florida, he did extensive undergraduate and graduate work in mathematics and computing for which he earned a B.A. in mathematics. He earned his M.S. and Ph.D. in economics from Florida State University, where he studied macroeconomics, monetary theory and policy, international trade and finance, mathematical economics, econometrics, and statistics.