Factbox: Search process for San Francisco Fed chief

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Christina Romer's resignation as head of the White House Council of Economic Advisers has revived speculation that her next job could be as president of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco.

Janet Yellen, who has run the San Francisco Fed since 2004, has been nominated to be vice chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, and the U.S. Senate is expected to act on the nomination when lawmakers return to Washington from their summer break.

Romer, who will step down on September 3 to return to her job as a professor at the University of California at Berkeley, has been mentioned for months as a candidate to replace Yellen.

"I certainly would be honored to be considered for the job," Romer told Reuters Insider on Friday. "I think it's important to realize that's not something that I can control or that anyone at the White House has any influence on. So we're just going to have to see what develops."

How does the search process work, and who might end up with the job?

WHO PICKS?

A committee of board members led by the San Francisco Fed's chairman, retired Levi Strauss & Co Chairman T. Gary Rogers, is heading the search, with the help of a search firm.

The committee will sift through candidates, interview several, and send dossiers of its two or three of its top choices to the Washington-based Federal Reserve Board, participants in several recent Fed searches said. The Board will sign off on the final pick.

CANDIDATES?

The initial pool is likely to include dozens of people, according to participants in past searches for Fed bank chiefs. Possible picks include:

* Romer, who this fall is heading back to her job as an economics professor at the University of California at Berkeley, across the San Francisco Bay from the bank's headquarters;

* John Williams, the San Francisco Fed's research director and a former senior economist at the Fed Board of Governors, whose recent research focuses on assessing tools for monetary policy;

* Laura Tyson, a professor at UC Berkeley's Hass School of Business and a former head of the White House Council of Economic Advisers;

* Glenn Rudebusch, senior vice president and associate director of research at the San Francisco Fed who recently wrote that it will be a "significant period of time" before the Fed begins raising rates.

INSIDE TRACK?

Most regional Fed boards pick chiefs who know the Fed from the inside. More than half of the 12 current regional Fed bank presidents worked under the bosses they succeeded, and only two -- the Atlanta Fed's Dennis Lockhart and the Dallas Fed's Richard Fisher -- had nothing to do with the Fed before they took the job.

Still, participants in recent searches said committees cast a wide net and look beyond Fed insiders.

DODD-FRANK CHANGES

The Dodd-Frank Act changes how regional Fed presidents are picked, eliminating bankers on the nine-member regional Fed board from participating in the search. The change is designed to reduce any conflict of interest by bankers picking the person who will run their regulator.

Yellen's successor will be the first Fed president picked under the new rules, but analysts say they will have little effect on the search.

SEVERAL MONTHS

The searches typically take months. If Yellen is confirmed and moves to Washington before the process is completed, the bank's first vice president, John Moore, will represent the San Francisco Fed at the U.S. central bank's policy-setting meetings until a new president is in place.

(Reporting by Ann Saphir; editing by Jeffrey Benkoe)