2013 will be a good year, NJIT biz professor forecasts at Chicago Fed Board

The first Henry J. Leir Professor of International Trade and Business in the NJIT School of Management, Rapp was invited to participate in the annual event which draws the nation's top business minds. Rapp is well-regarded world-wide for his research on international business, information technology strategy and financial institutions, especially those using technology to gain a competitive advantage.

Before joining NJIT in 2002, Rapp enjoyed an extensive international career in academia, business and government. He arrived at NJIT following a year in Japan as a Fulbright Scholar and APSIA Visiting Professor at Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto. While there, he assessed the political economic impact of Japan's rapidly aging population while lecturing on the Asian financial crisis and the history of investment banking.

More recently, Rapp has led the Financial Bubble School of Management Research Project at NJIT funded by the Ridgefield Foundation. He developed an undergraduate distance learning course on international business under a NJ-I Tower grant and a graduate distance learning Capstone course on strategic management. He finished a project on Japanese convenience stores and has begun another project on the globalization of major US law firms. He is now leading a real-time online case study initiative that includes studies on UPS, Dendrite, Pfizer, Toyota and Apple.

Rapp has written upwards of 80 individual and joint publications on aspects of trade, international business, and corporate strategy plus presented papers, given congressional testimony and public speeches on these topics. His major fields of policy, economic and business research include product cycles, trade and investment strategies, industrial policy, international finance, intellectual property, information technology, US-Japan competitive interaction and Japanese economy and business. With support from the Sloan Foundation, he wrote Information Technology Strategies (Oxford Press, 2002, 2004) which was translated into Japanese and published there in 2003.

Rapp received his doctorate from Yale University in economics as a National Science Foundation Fellow. His master's degrees in economics and Japanese Studies are from Yale and Stanford Universities, the later as a Ford Foundation Fellow. His bachelor's degree in economics is from Amherst College, magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa.

NJIT, New Jersey's science and technology university, enrolls more than 9,558 students pursuing bachelor's, master's and doctoral degrees in 120 programs. The university consists of six colleges: Newark College of Engineering, College of Architecture and Design, College of Science and Liberal Arts, School of Management, College of Computing Sciences and Albert Dorman Honors College.

U.S. News & World Report's 2012 Annual Guide to America's Best Colleges ranked NJIT in the top tier of national research universities. NJIT is internationally recognized for being at the edge in knowledge in architecture, applied mathematics, wireless communications and networking, solar physics, advanced engineered particulate materials, nanotechnology, neural engineering and e-learning. Many courses and certificate programs, as well as graduate degrees, are available online through the Division of Continuing Professional Education.