George M. Von Furstenberg - Life

Life

Von Furstenberg was born in the middle of the Second World War. He emigrated to America in his late teens.

Von Furstenberg did his undergraduate work at Columbia University, graduating in magna cum laude in 1963. From there, he went on to a doctorate in International Finance at Princeton University, with an internship at the Brookings Institution as a pre-doctoral fellow. He served for a year as an assistant professor of economics at Cornell, followed by another stint at Brookings, this time as an Economic Policy Fellow assigned to the Program Evaluation Section of the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). He returned to Cornell for two years as an assistant professor, then spent a summer as a consultant to HUD, before moving to Indiana as an associate professor. Following a stint as a visiting professor at the University of Augsburg, he became a full professor at Indiana, in 1973.

From 1973-1976 von Furstenberg served as Senior Staff Economist for the U.S. President's Council of Economic Advisors. He spent half a year as a resident economist at the American Enterprise Institute, then resumed his teaching duties in Bloomington. In 1978, he began a five-year stint as Chief of the Financial Studies Division of the International Monetary Fund. In 1983, he was named Rudy Professor of Economics.

While continuing to lecture at Indiana University, von Furstenberg has also made time for brief visiting professorships Justus-Liebig University and the University of Toronto and summer lectures at University of Szczecin, the Warsaw University School of Management International Business Program, and Catholic University of Lublin Business School. He has been the recipient of numerous Fulbright and other grants, and has consulted for several U.S. government agencies as well as the Deutsche Bundesbank.

From 2000-2002, von Furstenberg was the inaugural Robert Bendheim Professor of Economic and Fiscal Policy at the Fordham Graduate School of Business.

The professor is married and has one son. He speaks German and English fluently, has a working knowledge of French and some knowledge of Latin and Spanish. His wife speaks Dutch, German and French.