Barry Jones

About

Barry is a Professor in the Department of Economics at Binghamton University, where he has worked since 1999. His research focuses on topics in monetary economics including money demand and monetary asset substitution, the relationship between money, real economic activity, and inflation, and the measurement of money. He served as the Director of Undergraduate Studies from 2013 to 2015 and as Department Chair from 2016 to 2022. He is active in shared governance having served in various roles including as Chair of the Faculty Senate Executive Committee from 2018 to 2020 and as the Chair of the Budget Review Committee since 2020. He won the SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Faculty Teaching in 2014 and the SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Faculty Service in 2023. 

Barry received his BS in Business Administration with a major in Economics and a minor in Mathematics from Miami University in 1993 and he received MA and PhD degrees in Economics from Washington University in St. Louis, the latter in 1999. He now lives in New York.

Reflection

I am grateful to everyone at Miami for their incredible support. At Miami, my focus was divided between economics and math, and I was unsure at first which career path I should pursue. I eventually decided that working towards a graduate degree in economics would be the best of both worlds. I had many wonderful mentors while at Miami. Among them, Jim Dunleavy, Rich Hart, and Mark McBride taught economics courses that inspired my future interests (in different ways) and I would not have gotten into graduate school without their incredible help and support. From Math, Charles Holmes supervised my first independent research project, and Robert Smith took a group of us to our first academic conference at the University of Maine. The economics department was very helpful in creating the flexibility that I needed to stay on track and complete my major while at the same time taking high-level math courses including a graduate course in topology. I was also able to take the MA level core courses in micro and macro theory during my senior year, which gave me a leg up in graduate school. The faculty in economics really cared about me as a person and did everything they possibly could to help me and to create opportunities for me to pursue my academic interests. They have been an inspiration to me over the years as I have tried my best to follow in their footsteps.