High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Robert Ernest "Bob" Hall (1943) is an American economist at The Hoover Institute with a wide variety of interests. He is generally considered a macroeconomist, but he describes himself as an "applied economist". Bob Hall received a BA in Economics at the University of California, Berkeley and a PhD in Economics from MIT. He is a member of the Hoover Institution, the National Academy of Sciences, a fellow at both American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Econometric Society, and a member of the NBER, where he is the program director of the business cycle dating committee. Hall will serve as President-elect of the American Economic Association in 2009, and as President of AEA in 2010. In describing if marginal cost is procyclical, Hall argued that the key is knowing the productivity shocks in real business cycle theory are actually the result of monopoly power. Because monopolies can sell where their price exceeds marginal cost, they tend to have excess capacity. Thus, as demand increases, the excess capacity shrinks and marginal cost approaches price and in that way it is procyclical.