New Director for UCSB’s Economic Forecast Project

UCSB announced this week the appointment of economics professor Peter Rupert as director of the school’s Economic Forecast Project, a research unit that generates economic data, analysis, and forecasts. Rupert joined the university in 2007 and came to Santa Barbara from the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland where he was a senior economic adviser for 13 years. The appointment, said school officials, is part of an overall restructuring of the Project, which will now focus its attention more on Santa Barbara County alone. Because of campus budget cuts and declining scholarship revenues, the program now won’t present local forecasts and seminars in Ventura and San Luis Obispo.