Presentation Title: Productivity in the Global Value Chain World

Biography: William W. Beach became the 15th Commissioner of Labor Statistics on March 28, 2019. Before joining BLS, Dr. Beach was vice president for policy research at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University from February 2016 to March 2019. Before that he served as the Chief Economist for the Senate Budget Committee, Republican Staff, from 2013 through early 2016. Among his other professional positions, he was the Lazof Family Fellow in Economics at the Heritage Foundation and founder and director of the Foundation's Center for Data Analysis. Prior to joining Heritage in 1995, Dr. Beach served as a senior economist in the corporate headquarters of Sprint United, Inc., in Kansas City and, from 1991, as the president of the Institute for Humane Studies at George Mason University. A graduate of Washburn University in Topeka, Kansas, Beach also holds a master's degree in history and economics from the University of Missouri-Columbia and a Ph.D. in Economics from Buckingham University in Great Britain, where he is a Visiting Fellow in Economics.