Conference on Measuring and Managing Federal Financial Risk
February 8-9, 2007

Speaker Biographies

Tom O. Allen, CPA
Tom was appointed in January 2006 as a member of the Federal Accounting Standard Advisory Board and to be chairman of that board starting January 2007. He is currently serving on the accounting department faculty at Weber State University. He retired June 30, 2004 as Chairman of the Governmental Accounting Standards Board after serving in the capacity for nine years. Prior to becoming the GASB Chairman on July 1, 1995, he served one year as a part-time member of the Board. Tom was first elected as Utah State Auditor in 1984 and served as the State Auditor of Utah until he resigned to chair the GASB. He is a certified public accountant, and is a member of the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants where he served from 1987 to 1990 as Chairman of the AICPA Members in Government Committee. He also served on the AICPA's Ethics Executive Committee, Government Accounting and Auditing Committee, and Auditing Standards Board.

In 1990, he was selected by the National Association of Government Accountants as The Outstanding Fiscal Officer from State and Local Governments in the United States. In 1991 he was selected to receive the Donald L. Scantlebury Memorial Award by the Federal Joint Financial Management Improvement Program (JFMIP) for distinguished leadership in financial management improvement. Also in 1991, he was honored as the Outstanding CPA by the Utah Association of CPAs.

Henning Bohn
Henning Bohn is Professor of Economics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His research and teaching is in the areas of macroeconomics, public economics, and international finance. He has published scholarly articles on a variety of topics including government debt, public debt management, social security, tax theory, demographic change, and international capital flows. Prof. Bohn received his Ph.D. from Stanford in 1986 under the guidance of Ben Bernanke. Before moving to UCSB in 1992, he served on the finance faculty at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

Dan Crippen
Dan L. Crippen was the fifth director of the Congressional Budget Office and served in that capacity from February 1999 to January 2003. Crippen has served in senior positions in the White House and the U.S. Senate, and is a specialist in issues relating to the federal budget, health care, retirement, trade, and telecommunications.

From 1987 to 1989, Crippen served as the president's adviser on all issues relating to domestic policy, including the preparation and presentation of the federal budget. In the Senate, he served as chief counsel and economic policy adviser to the Senate Majority Leader from 1981 to 1985, working on major tax and budget bills as well as other legislation.

Crippen also has substantial experience in the private sector. Before joining CBO, he was a principal with Washington Counsel, a consulting firm. He has also served as executive director of the Merrill Lynch International Advisory Council and as senior vice president of the Duberstein Group.

The Congressional Budget Office was created by the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974. CBO's mission is to provide the Congress with the objective, timely, nonpartisan analyses needed for economic and budget decisions and with the information and estimates required for the congressional budget process. The position is jointly appointed by the speaker of the House of Representatives and the president pro tempore of the Senate after considering recommendations from the two congressional budget committees.

J. David Cummins
J. David Cummins is the Joseph E. Boettner Professor of Insurance, Risk Management, and Financial Institutions at Temple University and Professor Emeritus at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. His fields of specialization include industrial organization of insurance markets, securitization, financial risk management, productivity, and efficiency. Dr. Cummins has published more than eighty refereed journal articles, thirty-two book chapters, and has written or edited sixteen books. He has received more than twenty prizes for his research. Among his recent books are Handbook of International Insurance: Between Global Dynamics and Local Contingencies (Springer), Changes in the Life Insurance Industry: Efficiency, Technology, and Risk Management (Kluwer Academic), and Deregulating Property-Liability Insurance: Restoring Competition and Increasing Market Efficiency (The Brookings Institution). Dr. Cummins also has served as consultant to numerous business and governmental organizations including the American Insurance Association, Ace Insurance Group, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Liberty Mutual, the National Association of Insurance Commissioners, and the Casualty Actuarial Society. He is a past-president of the American Risk and Insurance Association and has served as editor of the Journal of Risk and Insurance. He currently is co-editor of the Journal of Banking and Finance and Associate Editor of eight other refereed journals.

Janice Eberly
Janice Eberly is the John L. and Helen Kellogg Distinguished Professor of Finance and Chair of the Finance Department. Before joining the Kellogg faculty, she was a faculty member in Finance at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Professor Eberly's research focuses on finance and macroeconomics. Her work studies firms' capital budgeting decisions and household consumption and portfolio choice. She further examines the interaction of these spending and investment choices with the macroeconomy. Her current research emphasizes the role of technological change and adoption on capital budgeting. She has received a Sloan Foundation research fellowship and grant funding from the National Science Foundation.

An Associate Editor of the American Economic Review, the Journal of Monetary Economics, and Macroeconomic Dynamics, Professor Eberly is also an associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, and has been a visiting scholar at several Federal Reserve Banks and the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. She also served on the staff of the President's Council of Economic Advisors.

Professor Eberly has won numerous awards for her teaching, including most recently the Chairs' Core Teaching Award in 2001 and 2006 and the Outstanding Professor Award from the Executive Master's Program in 2002. She received her Ph.D. in Economics from MIT.

Douglas Elliott
Mr. Elliott is the founder of the Center on Federal Financial Institutions. He ran COFFI as a full-time volunteer from its inception in 2004 until May of 2006, when he rejoined J.P. Morgan Securities as a Managing Director in its Capital Structure Advisory and Solutions group. In this capacity, he develops sophisticated financial products to assist insurers and pension funds in managing their risk and capital positions. Mr. Elliott remains COFFI's President and Chairman of the Board and continues to write analyses.

Mr. Elliott is particularly known as an expert on the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, having created the first independent financial model of the PBGC's annual cash flows and published the first detailed Primer on PBGC. He has testified before Congress on both PBGC and on the National Flood Insurance Program. He has also authored detailed analyses of the federal student loan program, Terrorism Risk Insurance, and federal budget procedures for credit and insurance programs. He was a featured speaker at a Federal Reserve conference on Federal Lending and Insurance Activity, in October 2005. He was also a member of the National Academy of Social Insurance's panel: "Uncharted Waters: Paying for Benefits From Individual Accounts in Federal Retirement Policy." The panel's findings were published as a book in 2005.

His analyses have been featured in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Financial Times, The Economist, U.S. News & World Report, Business Week, and numerous other publications. ABC World News Tonight, The Newshour with Jim Lehrer, and The Nightly Business Report on PBS, have all featured extensive interviews with him, as have many other TV and radio shows.

Mr. Elliott has worked as an investment banker for almost twenty years, starting with a dozen years at J.P. Morgan and continuing with Sanford Bernstein, Sandler O'Neill & Partners, and ABN AMRO. After an initial stint developing software to signal when Morgan should buy or sell the dollar against foreign currencies, he has devoted the rest of his career to working with insurers, banks, and pension funds.

Mr. Elliott has advised on transactions with a value of over $20 billion, including: a novel restructuring that resulted in an immediate increase of $2 billion in CIGNA's market value; the purchase of Michigan National Bank for $3 billion; the sale of European American Bank for $2 billion; the largest three-way merger of mutual insurance companies in history; the purchase of Travelers Insurance for $4 billion; and the purchase of Allegheny Asset Management for $1 billion. He advised other household names, such as Prudential, Allstate, Xerox, Dow Chemical, Zurich Insurance, ITT, St. Paul, Farmers Group, and Ralston Purina, among others. In the public sector, he advised PBGC and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts .

Mr. Elliott graduated from Harvard College with an A.B. in Sociology, magna cum laude, and with a Master's in Computer Science from Duke University.

Peter Fisher
Peter R. Fisher, Managing Director, is Chairman of BlackRock Asia with responsibilities for the firm's businesses in Hong Kong (SAR), Japan, Korea, The People's Republic of China, Singapore, Taiwan and Southeast Asia. He is a member of BlackRock's Management Committee and co-chair of its International Operating Committee.

Prior to joining BlackRock in 2004, Mr. Fisher served as the Under Secretary of the US Treasury for Domestic Finance from August 2001 to October 2003. In that capacity, he also served as the Treasury Board representative to the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC) and as a member of the Board of the Securities Investor Protection Corporation (SIPC). Before joining the Treasury, Mr. Fisher spent 15 years at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, concluding his service there as Executive Vice President and Manager of the System Open Market Account. Mr. Fisher is a non-executive Director of the Financial Services Authority of the United Kingdom and also serves on the Board of the Episcopal Church Foundation.

Mr. Fisher earned a BA degree in history from Harvard College in 1980 and a JD degree from Harvard Law School in 1985.

John Geanakoplos
John Geanakoplos received his B.A. in Mathematics from Yale University in 1975 (summa cum laude), his M.A. in Mathematics and his Ph.D. in Economics under Kenneth Arrow from Harvard University in 1980. He started as an Assistant Professor in Economics at Yale University in 1980, becoming an Associate Professor in 1983, Professor in 1986, and the James Tobin Professor of Economics in 1994. He is currently the Director of the Cowles Foundation for Research in Economics. He was elected a fellow of the Econometric Society in 1990 and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1999. He was awarded the Samuelson Prize in 1999 (for work on lifetime financial security), and was awarded the first Bodossaki Prize in economics in 1994. In 1990-1991 and again in 1999-2000 he directed the economics program at the Santa Fe Institute, where he remains an external professor. He spent terms as visiting professor at MSRI in the University of California, Berkeley, at Churchill College, Cambridge, at the University of Pennsylvania, and at MIT. From 1990-1995 he was a Managing Director and Head of Fixed Income Research at Kidder, Peabody & Co., Inc, and now he is a partner at Ellington Capital Management. In 1970 he won the United States Junior Open Chess Championship

Geoffrey Heal
Geoffrey Heal is Garrett Professor of Public Policy and Corporate Responsibility at Columbia University's Graduate School of Business. He is also Professor of International and Public Affairs in the School of International Affairs, Director of the Center for Globalization and Sustainable Development of Columbia's Earth Institute, and Director of Graduate Studies for the Ph.D Program on Sustainable Development. He has served as Senior Vice Dean of Columbia Business School.

Dr. Heal studied Physics and Economics at Cambridge, and then taught at Cambridge, Sussex, Essex, Stanford, Yale and Princeton, and held a Fullbright Professorship at the University of Siena. Dr. Heal has acted as Managing Editor of the Review of Economic Studies and has acted on the Editorial Boards of many other journals. In the 1970s he founded a London-based consulting firm, and in the 1980s a firm providing systems for telecommunications and data processing to the international securities business. He was a Commissioner of the Pew Oceans Commission (www.pewoceans.org), is a Director of the Union of Concerned Scientists (www.ucsusa.org), a Director of the Beijer Institute of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and a Fellow of the Econometric Society and the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists. He is Past President of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, and recipient of that organization’s 2004 Award for Publication of Enduring Quality for his 1979 book (with Dasgupta) Economic Theory and Exhaustible Resources.

Dr. Heal has made many contributions to economic theory and the application of mathematical techniques in economics. One of Dr. Heal’s current research interests is the interaction between society and its natural resource base. Dr. Heal has been working to formalize and operationalize the concept of sustainability and develop an interdisciplinary group of social and biological scientists committed to research on the interface between the biological and social sciences. Recent books on this include “Valuing the Future” and “Nature and the Marketplace.” Dr. Heal’s other research fields include the management of risks by financial markets, and especially the securitization of catastrophic risks and analysis of the systemic risks associated with the growth of derivative markets. Recently Dr. Heal has worked on airline security and on corporate social responsibility, and has developed a course on CSR entitled “Business and Society: Doing Well by Doing Good?”

G. William Hoagland
Recently, Director of Budget and Appropriations, U.S. Senate, Majority Leader's Office, 2003-2006. Formerly, U.S. Senate Budget Committee, 1982-2002, Staff Director. Congressional Budget Office 1976-1981.

Howell Jackson
Howell Jackson is James S. Reid, Jr., Professor at Harvard Law School. His research interests include financial regulation, international finance, consumer protection, federal budget policy, and Social Security reform. Professor Jackson has served as a consultant to the United States Treasury Department, the United Nations Development Program, and the World Bank/International Monetary Fund. He is a member of the National Academy on Social Insurance, a trustee of the College Retirement Equities Fund (CREF) and its affiliated TIAACREF investment companies, and a member of the panel of outside scholars for the NBER Retirement Research Center. Professor Jackson frequently testifies before Congress and consults with government agencies on issues of financial regulation. He is co-author of Fiscal Challenges: An Inter-Disciplinary Approach to Budget Policy (forthcoming Cambridge University Press 2007), Analytical Methods for Lawyers (Foundation Press 2003), and Regulation of Financial Institutions (West 1999), and author of numerous scholarly articles. Before joining the Harvard Law School faculty in 1989, he clerked for Associate Justice Thurgood Marshall and practiced law in Washington, D.C. Professor Jackson received J.D. and M.B.A. degrees from Harvard University and his B.A. from Brown University.

Dwight M. Jaffee
Dwight M. Jaffee is the Willis Booth Professor of Banking, Finance, and Real Estate at the Haas School of Business, University of California at Berkeley, where has taught since 1991. He previously taught for many years in the economics department of Princeton University. Professor Jaffee is a member of the Haas School’s Finance and Real Estate groups, and co-chair of the Fisher Center for Real Estate and Urban Economics.

His primary areas of research include real estate finance (especially mortgage backed securitization and the government sponsored enterprises) and insurance (especially earthquakes, terrorism, and auto). He recently co-authored a book entitled Globalization and a High-Tech Economy: California, the US, and Beyond. He is currently a Distinguished Visiting Professor at the National University of Singapore, and has been a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. He has also served in numerous advisory roles for the World Bank, the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight, and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. He received his doctorate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1968.

Howard Kunreuther
Howard Kunreuther is the Cecilia Yen Koo Professor of Decision Sciences and Public Policy at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania as well as serving as Co-Director of the Wharton Risk Management and Decision Processes Center. He has a long-standing interest in ways that society can better manage low probability-high consequence events as it relates to technological and natural hazards and has published extensively on the topic. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and Distinguished Fellow of the Society for Risk Analysis, receiving the Society's Distinguished Achievement Award in 2001. Kunreuther has written or co-edited a number of books and papers including Catastrophe Modeling: A New Approach to Managing Risk (with Patricia Grossi) and Wharton on Making Decisions (with Stephen Hoch). He is a recipient of the Elizur Wright Award for the publication that makes the most significant contribution to the literature of insurance.

Deborah Lucas
Deborah Lucas is the Donald C. Clark / HSBC Distinguished Professor of Finance. Professor Lucas's research spans the areas of dynamic asset pricing, federal financial institutions, and corporate finance. She is currently an editor of the Journal of Money, Credit and Banking and an associate editor of several journals. She is a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, and a member of the National Academy of Social Insurance. She is a member of the 2006-7 Social Security Technical Advisory Panel on Assumptions and Methods, and serves on the board of several public and non-profit companies. Past appointments include chief economist, Congressional Budget Office; senior staff economist, Council of Economic Advisers; and visiting assistant professor at MIT. She received her Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Chicago.

Alan J. Marcus
Alan Marcus is Professor of Finance in the Wallace E. Carroll School of Management at Boston College. He received his Ph.D. from MIT, has been a visiting professor at MIT’s Sloan School of Management and Athens Laboratory of Business Administration, and has served as a Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research, where he participated in both the Pension Economics and the Financial Markets and Monetary Economics Groups. Professor Marcus also spent two years at the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation (Freddie Mac), where he helped to develop mortgage pricing and credit risk models. Professor Marcus has published widely in the fields of capital markets and portfolio theory and is the coauthor of the widely-used textbooks Investments (with Zvi Bodie and Alex Kane) and Fundamentals of Corporate Finance (with Richard Brealey and Stewart Myers). He currently serves on the Research Foundation Advisory Board of the CFA Institute.

Donald B. Marron
Donald B. Marron became CBO's Deputy Director in October 2005 and began serving as Acting Director as of December 30. Previously, Dr. Marron served as Chief Economist for the President's Council of Economic Advisers. In that capacity, he analyzed a broad range of fiscal, regulatory, and macroeconomic policies and directed a team that monitored the state of the economy and developed economic forecasts.

Prior to holding that post, Dr. Marron was the Executive Director and Chief Economist of the Congress's Joint Economic Committee, where he led a team that advised Members of Congress and Congressional staff about the performance of the economy, fiscal policy challenges, and the impacts of legislative proposals.

Before his government service, Dr. Marron was chief financial officer of a medical software start-up in Austin, Texas, and a principal and senior associate with the Washington, D.C., office of Charles River Associates, where he provided business consulting and litigation support to companies in a variety of industries. He also served as an assistant professor of economics at the University of Chicago's Graduate School of Business from 1994 to 1998, where he taught courses in microeconomics, entrepreneurial finance and private equity, and environmental policy.

Dr. Marron has published articles on a broad range of topics, including tax policy, intellectual property, and energy and environmental policy.

Robert McDonald
Robert McDonald is Erwin P. Nemmers Distinguished Professor of Finance. He has been a faculty member since 1984 and also served as department chair. Before joining Kellogg, he was a faculty member at Boston University and has been a visiting professor at the University of Chicago. He has taught courses in derivatives, corporate finance, and taxation.

Professor McDonald's research interests include corporate finance, taxation, derivatives, and applications of option pricing theory to corporate investments. Several of his papers have won research awards, including the Graham and Dodd Scroll from the Financial Analyst's Federation, the Iddo Sarnat Prize from the Journal of Banking and Finance, the Smith Breeden Prize from the Journal of Finance, and the Review of Financial Studies Prize from the Review of Financial Studies.

Professor McDonald is Co-Editor of the Review of Financial Studies, and has served on a number of editorial boards, including those for the Journal of Finance, Management Science, and the Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis. He is the author of Derivatives Markets, a text published in 2002 by Addison Wesley. He received a BA in Economics from the University of North Carolina and a Ph.D. in Economics from MIT.

Damien Moore
Damien Moore is an Analyst in the Macroeconomic Analysis Division at the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) in Washington, DC. Prior to joining the CBO, he was a faculty member in the Finance Department at the University of Sydney in Australia. Previous research includes papers on household finances, retirement saving and higher education financing.

Greg Niehaus
Greg Niehaus (Ph.D. Washington University, 1985) is a Professor of Insurance and Finance at the University of South Carolina. His articles have been published in the Journal of Financial Economics, Journal of Finance, Journal of Business, Journal of Banking and Finance, The Accounting Review, Financial Management, Journal of Financial Services Research, Journal of Risk and Insurance, and the Financial Analysts Journal. His current research interests include corporate finance, the economics of insurance, corporate pension plans, and corporate risk management. Professor Niehaus has won several teaching awards and has co-authored a textbook, Insurance and Risk Management, with Scott Harrington.

Marvin Phaup
Deputy Assistant Director
Financial Studies Unit
Macroeconomic Analysis Division
U.S. Congressional Budget Office

Marvin Phaup has headed the Financial Studies/Budget Process group at CBO since 1988. His work has focused on analyses of federal financial policies and institutions and the implications for their budgetary treatment. His early work contributed to the development and adoption of the Federal Credit Reform Act of 1990, which changed the budgetary basis of accounting for direct loans and loan guarantees from cash-basis to accrual. More recently, the financial studies group has addressed the federal cost of government sponsored enterprises, including Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the Federal Home Loan Banks; the budgetary treatment of federal investment in risky private securities; the effect of including the cost of market risk in the subsidy cost of federal guarantees; the value of pension insurance provided by the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation; terrorism insurance; the market value of FHA mortgage insurance; the option value of deposit insurance; the cost of the federal student loan programs; reconciling the federal financial statements with the budget; and possible revisions to the Federal Credit Reform Act.

Prior to joining the Congressional Budget Office, he served as Senior Economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, Lecturer at the University of Lancaster (England), and Assistant Professor at Roanoke College. Phaup received a Ph.D. (economics) from Virginia and B.A. from Roanoke College. He also studied at the University of Oslo under the Hays-Fulbright program.

He received the S. Kenneth Howard Award for Lifetime Achievement in Public Budgeting and Finance from the Association for Budgeting and Financial Management in 2004 and the National Distinguished Service Award from the American Association for Budget and Program Analysis in 1995.

William A. Pizer
Pizer's research seeks to quantify how the design of environmental policy affects costs and effectiveness. Specific research has focused on the aggregate level and distribution of these costs; uncertainty about cost; technological change; banking, trading and other flexibility mechanisms; and valuation over long time horizons. He applies much of this work to the question of how to design and implement policies to reduce the threat of climate change caused by manmade emissions of greenhouse gases. Currently, he is working on projects that look at the effectiveness of voluntary programs, the role of technology programs in pollution control efforts, and the effect of regulation on competitiveness.

Pizer is a Lead Author on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 4 th Assessment Report and serves on both the EPA Environmental Economics Advisory Committee and the DOE Climate Change Science Program Product Development Advisory Committee. Since August 2002, Pizer has worked part-time as a Senior Economist at the National Commission on Energy Policy. During 2001-2002, he served as a Senior Economist at the President's Council of Economic Advisers where he worked on environment and climate change issues. He was a Visiting Scholar at Stanford University's Center for Environmental Science and Policy during 2000-2001, and taught at Johns Hopkins University during 1997-1999.

John Quigley
Donald Terner Distinguished Professorship in Affordable Housing and Urban Policy. Haas Real Estate Group at University of California – Berkeley.
Director, Berkeley Program on Housing & the Urban Economy
Associate Dean for Academic Affairs
Chancellor's Professor of Economics, Department of Economics
Professor of Public Policy, Goldman School of Public Policy
Academic Status: On sabbatical, 2006-2007
Office Hours: By email appointment only, F614
Personal Homepage
Curriculum Vitae (in PDF format, Acrobat Reader required)

Katherine Schipper
Katherine Schipper is the Thomas F. Keller Professor of Business Administration at Duke University's Fuqua School of Business. Prior to joining Duke University, she was a member of the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB). She has also been a faculty member at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Chicago.

Ms. Schipper has published research papers on a wide range of topics in financial reporting, corporation finance and corporate governance. She has been named the American Accounting Association’s Outstanding Educator, and Distinguished International Lecturer. She has served the American Accounting Association as Director of Research, as President and as President of the Financial Accounting and Reporting Section. She is or has been a member of the governing boards of a public company, a mutual fund and a not-for-profit entity.

Ms. Schipper holds a BA degree from the University of Dayton, MBA, MA and PhD degrees from the University of Chicago and an honorary degree from Notre Dame University.

Kent Smetters
Associate Professor of Insurance and Risk Management at Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania.
PhD, Harvard University, 1995; MA, Harvard University, 1992; BS, Ohio State University, 1990

Research Areas:
Social insurance programs; incomplete markets; annuity markets; tax reform; pricing government guarantees

Academic Positions Held:
Wharton: 1998-present. Visiting appointment: Stanford University

Other Positions:
Economist, Congressional Budget Office, 1995-98; Faculty Research Fellow, Aging Program, National Bureau of Economic Research, 2000-present; Research Associate, Public Economics, National Bureau of Economic Research, 2001-present; Deputy Assistant Secretary of Economic Policy, US Treasury: 2001-2002; Member, Blue Ribbon Advisory Panel on Dynamic Scoring, U.S. Congress (JCT), 2002-present; Member, National Academy of Social Insurance, 2002-present; Research Associate, Michigan Retirement Research Center, 2000-present

Career and Recent Professional Awards; Teaching Awards:
Fellowship, National Science Foundation, 1990-93; TIAA-CREF Paul A. Samuelson, Certificate of Excellence, 2002; Robert C. Witt Award for the best paper published in the Journal of Risk and Insurance, 2000

Susan M. Wachter
Dr. Susan M. Wachter is the Richard B. Worley Professor of Financial Management and Professor of Real Estate and Finance at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Wachter served as Assistant Secretary for Policy Development and Research at HUD, a President appointed and Senate confirmed position, from 1998 to 2001. The Chairperson of the Wharton Real Estate Department from 1996 to 1998, Dr. Wachter is the author of over 150 publications. Dr. Wachter served as President of the American Real Estate and Urban Economics Association and coeditor of Real Estate Economics, the leading academic real estate journal. Dr. Wachter currently serves on multiple editorial boards and is the Co-Director of the Penn Institute for Urban Research.

David W. Wilcox
Deputy Director, Division of Research and Statistics, Federal Reserve Board

• Fields of Interest
  • Monetary Policy
  • Macroeconomics
  • Fiscal Policy
• Education
  • Ph.D., Economics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1987
  • B.A., Mathematics, Williams College, 1980
• Professional Experience
  • Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, 2001-present
  • Assistant Secretary for Economic Policy, Treasury Department, 1997-2001
  • Senior Economist, Council of Economic Advisers, 1994-1995
    Economist and Senior Economist, Federal Reserve Board, 1986-1997
    Member, Board of Editors, American Economic Review, 1994-1997

George Zanjani
Fields of interest: Insurance, Financial institutions, Risk management, Terrorism

George Zanjani is an economist in the Capital Markets Function of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. His research focuses on the insurance industry, where he worked as an actuary before joining the Bank. His research interests include the pricing of catastrophe insurance, the organizational composition of the insurance industry, and the effects of public intervention in terrorism reinsurance and other catastrophe insurance markets. His academic publications include articles in the Journal of Financial Economics and the Journal of Public Economics.

Stephen P. Zeldes
Stephen P. Zeldes is the Benjamin Rosen Professor of Economics and Finance at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Business, and chair of the school’s Economics Subdivision. He is also a Research Associate with the National Bureau of Economic Research.

In his research, Professor Zeldes has examined a wide range of applied macroeconomic issues, including social security reform, pension policy, the determinants of household saving and portfolio choice, the effects of government budget deficits, and the relationship between consumer spending and the stock market. His research has been published in the leading academic journals.

Professor Zeldes teaches the core macroeconomics course “The Global Economic Environment” to Columbia Business School’s MBA students. He has also been chosen to lead the school’s new initiative to develop innovative teaching materials.

Professor Zeldes is a member of the Advisory Board of the Pension Research Council and is also a member of the Board of Overseers of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. He previously served as a member of the Technical Panel on Trends and Issues in Retirement Saving that reported to the 1994-96 Advisory Council on Social Security, and the National Academy of Social Insurance Panel on Social Security Privatization.

Professor Zeldes joined the Columbia faculty in 1996. Prior to this, he was a Professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He received his doctorate in economics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1984 and his bachelor’s degree in economics and applied mathematics from Brown University in 1978.