Name: CITU, Florin Vasile
Date of birth: 01.04.1972
E-mail: fcitu@yahoo.com
Nationality: Romanian
Civil status: Married

EDUCATION

Date: Summer 2003
Empirical Methods For Building Macroeconomic Models
Center for Financial Studies in Frankfurt

Date: 2002 Ph.D.(ABD)
Iowa State University, USA
Major: Macroeconomics, International Economics, Econometrics
Minor: Statistics

Date: 1998
M.S. in Economics
Iowa State University, USA
Dissertation “Asymmetric Interest Rate Responses: Bank of England”

Date: 1996
B.A. in Economics
Grinnell College, USA
Major: Economics, Mathematics

AWARDS

Date:1995-1996

Eastern European Block Scholar, Grinnell College
Wilson Grant, Grinnell College

Date:1993-1995

NAFSA Scholarship, Grinnell College

PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE

Date: 2003 - January 2005
Location:
Organisation: European Investment Bank
Position: Economist/Economic and Financial Studies
Job description:

• Write weekly economic analysis on different macroeconomic topics such as: role of the Euro as an international reserve currency, monetary policy and asset prices, corporate and household debt, and IMF FSAP evaluations.
• Prepare speeches for the President and Vice-Presidents of the EIB.
• Create and manage large data base for macroeconomic variables.

Date: 2001- 2003
Location: New Zealand
Organisation: Reserve Bank of New Zealand
Position: Economist
Job description:

• Analyse and further develop the economic issues and applied models relating to the Reserve Bank’s policy responsibilities.
• Specific tasks: developed a VAR model that identifies the transmission mechanism in NZ, developed different models of interest rates dynamics, developed alternative model for short term forecast of inflation and interest rates, looked at high frequency exchange rate data to identify PPP (e.g. GARCH models), provided assistance to the staff of RBNZ with implementing and testing different modelling techniques for both macroeconomic and financial variables.
• Until June 24, 2003, attended Monetary Policy Committee and OCR Advisory Group meetings and briefed the Governor on the Transmission Mechanism in NZ.

Date: 1997-2001
Organisation: Iowa State University
Location: USA
Position: Lecturer
Job description:

• Lecturer for: money and finance, econometrics, and time series analysis at undergraduate level.
• Specific topics covered: bond markets, financial institutions, ARIMA and multivariate time series models
• Research assistant: Modelling and forecasting different agricultural prices

Date: 1996-1997
Organisation: Young and Rubicam
Location: USA
Position: Junior Research Executive
Job description:

• Conducted research on brand recognition and made use of different statistical packages
• Presentations to potential clients

FOREIGN LANGUAGES

Romanian (native language): 5 (passive) - 5 (spoken) - 5 (written)
English: 5 (passive) - 5 (spoken) - 5 (written)
French:  4 (passive) - 3 (spoken) - 4 (written)
Italian: 3 (passive) - 3 (spoken) - 4 (written)

COMPUTER SKILLS

SOFTWARE:
Econometrics software E-VIEWS, RATS, S-plus, GAUSS and TSP
Computational software MATLAB, Mathematica
Modelling software Winsolve, PcGets
Others Excel, Scientific Word, Word, HTML

PUBLICATIONS

2004

“A VAR investigation of the Transmission Mechanism in NZ” Discussion Paper RBNZ (forthcoming)

2003

‘Inflation Targeting: what are the crucial issues in practice?’ (with Olivier Basdevant) Policy Paper National Bank of Romania. The paper was presented in September 2003 at a conference on Inflation Targeting at National Bank of Romania.
‘The output gap and its role in monetary policy decision-making’ (with James Twaddle), published RBNZ Bulletin

2002

‘Inflation targeting vs. Price Level Targeting’, published RBNZ Bulletin

OTHER ARTICLES

‘Asymmetric interest rate responses - Bank of England’ (TAR)-Thesis at Iowa State University
‘Australasian Bilateral PPP with Asymmetric Adjustment’ (ECM with TAR), work in progress
‘CPI distribution in NZ’ Memo at RBNZ 2002
‘An ANZAC currency union: is the NZ dollar already fixed to the AU dollar?’ (GARCH) work in progress with Dr. C. Plantier

KEY QUALIFICATIONS

Monetary policy, interest rates analysis, applied macroeconomic analysis, monetary transmission mechanism, exchange rate analysis and forecasting, and time series modelling (e.g. VARs, TAR, ARCH)

OTHERS

Conferences attended

Discussant at the ‘Australasian Macro-workshop’, Wellington, NZ, 2002
Discussant at ‘NZEA conference’, Wellington, NZ, 2002
‘Asymmetric interest rate responses - Bank of England’ presented at ‘ESAM 2002’, Brisbane, Australia, 2002
‘Australasian Bilateral PPP with Asymmetric Adjustment’, presented at ‘NZESG’, Dunedin, NZ, 2002

MEMBER OF THE FOLLOWING PROFESSIONAL BODIES

European Economic Association
Econometric Society
New Zealand Association of Economists
New Zealand Econometric Study Group

REFEREE

New Zealand Economic Papers