Directors' College 2021 Online
Robert (Bob) Madsen
Senior Economist, Hale Global Economics
Robert Madsen is a macroeconomist who advises financial institutions, corporations, and governments on international developments. He recently completed a project on impact investing and corporate governance for a $10 billion institutional investor and two studies on global demographic trends and their implications for, respectively, a $140 billion investment group and a security consultancy. He speaks frequently on international affairs at Stanford University.
Between 2004 and 2015 he was a Senior Fellow at MIT’s Center for International Studies. Over that decade he also served on the Executive Council at Unison Capital, Japan’s premier private equity group; and as a consultant to one of the “super-major” oil companies, which he helped with global and regional forecasting as well as the 2008-2009 financial crisis, fiscal and monetary policies in the major economies, Chinese politics and economics, European debt and banking, and the future of the Eurozone. He additionally worked as Senior Economist and Advisor at Asia Alternatives, a fund-of funds; and a retained consultant to Caxton Corporation, a macroeconomic hedge fund.
From 1997 to 2013, Dr. Madsen wrote the Economist Intelligence Unit’s (EIU) Japan Country Reports and contributed to that company’s analysis of China, broader East Asia,and the world. He also did substantial modeling of national debt sustainability, the future of Chinese GDP growth, and other topics amenable to quantitative analysis. Before joining MIT in 2004, he was a Fellow at Stanford University’s Asia Pacific Research Center, Asia Strategist at Soros Private Funds Management, and a limited partner and advisor to the Robert M. Bass Group on its investments in Japan. Still earlier, as a management consultant at McKinsey & Company he focused on international finance, the EPC industry, and Overseas Chinese business networks in Southeast Asia.
Robert Madsen graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Harvard University’s Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations and then entered Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar, where he earned a master’s degree, with distinction, and a doctorate in international relations. He also holds a J.D., with distinction, from Stanford Law School and is a member of the California State Bar. Having spent over a dozen years abroad, he is fluent in Japanese and Mandarin Chinese.
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