Anna Bernasek - In hindsight it was probably inevitable that I would write about economics. I was born in Boston, Massachusetts in the fall of 1968. At the time my father was a research fellow at the Russian Research Center at Harvard and an associate professor of economics at Boston University. Following a daring escape from the communist regime in Czechoslovakia in 1949, my father was granted asylum in Australia where he met and married my mother, a vivacious beauty of Russian descent. My mother’s grandfather was a successful industrialist who following imprisonment by the Bolsheviks had fled with his family to Australia via Shanghai.

When I was two years old my family left Boston and returned to Sydney, Australia. I was schooled in sunny Sydney until I came back to the United States to attend college in Michigan. I took my B.A. in Economics at the University of Michigan, graduating in 1990. At the time my sister Alexandra was finishing her Ph.D. in economics at U. of M. and my father was teaching in the economics department.

Following college I returned to Sydney to join the Sydney Morning Herald as a reporter. On the newspaper I covered global financial markets from the country’s financial center and then wrote about economics and policy from the press gallery in Canberra. After five years at the Sydney Morning Herald I was recruited to TIME and wrote about business, politics and economics in Sydney.

Fascinated by the extraordinary economic changes taking place after the fall of communism, I moved to Prague in the Czech Republic in 1996 to work as an equities analyst for Wood & Co and covered the fledgling Czech market. Still with Wood I subsequently moved to Budapest, Hungary to cover other central European companies.

In 1998, I accepted a scholarship to attend Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School where I earned a Masters in Public Policy. Upon graduating from Princeton, I joined Fortune magazine as a writer covering the economy. During my years at Fortune I also contributed articles to the Washington Post and appeared as a regular commentator on CNN and CNBC. In 2004, I left Fortune to become a contributing columnist for the New York Times and to pursue writing under my own name.

The Economics of Integrity is my first book.