Alan Ahearne is Professor of Economics at the University of Galway. Alan served as Economic Adviser to Taoiseach Micheál Martin from July 2020 to December 2024. He served as a non-executive director of the Central Bank of Ireland from 2011 to 2020, and chaired the Banks Risk Committee and Budget and Remuneration Committee. He served as Chair of the Joint Department of Finance ESRI Research Programme on the Macroeconomy, Taxation and Banking, and was a member of the External Advisory Group to Ireland's Parliamentary Budget Office.

He has served as adviser to the IMF, Consultant to the U.K. Department for International Development, and as a Research Fellow at the think tank Bruegel in Brussels. He holds an honorary appointment at the Darden Graduate School of Business Administration at the University of Virginia. Alan served as Economic Adviser to Ireland's Minister for Finance Brian Lenihan from 2009 to 2011. In this role, he advised the Minister on economic, budgetary and financial policy in responding to the economic and financial crisis. He served during 2018/19 as a member of the Independent Review Group set up by the Department of Health to examine the removal of private practice from public acute hospitals.

Alan obtained his PhD from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh in 1998 and subsequently joined the Federal Reserve Board in Washington DC, where he worked for seven years as a Senior Economist. At the Fed, he advised Alan Greenspan, Ben Bernanke and other Fed Governors on developments in the global economy. He was the principal economist at the Fed covering the Japanese and Chinese economies.

Dr. Ahearne’s areas of expertise are macroeconomics and international finance. His research includes studies on property markets in Ireland and other industrial countries; global current account imbalances and exchange rates; and the economic performance of the euro area. In addition to being published in top academic journals, his research has featured in The Economist, Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Irish Times, and Sunday Business Post.

Macroeconomics; Models of economic growth; Business cycles; International capital flows; Exchange rates.