Speaker biographies

Andrew G. Biggs is a resident scholar at AEI specializing in Social Security and retirement policy. He previously served as the principal deputy commissioner of the Social Security Administration (SSA), where he oversaw SSA’s policy research efforts and led the agency’s participation in the Social Security Trustees working group. In 2005, he worked on Social Security reform at the White House National Economic Council, and in 2001, he was on the staff of the President’s Commission to Strengthen Social Security. Mr. Biggs has written about Social Security reform for numerous publications including the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and the Christian Science Monitor. He is also the author of AEI’s Retirement Policy Outlook series.

Zvi Bodie is the Norman and Adele Barron Professor of Management at Boston University. He has also served on the finance faculty at the Harvard Business School and MIT’s Sloan School of Management, and has published widely on pension finance and investment strategy in leading professional journals. He has authored numerous books, including The Future of Life Cycle Saving and Investing (Research Foundation of CFA Institute, 2007) and Worry Free Investing: A Safe Approach to Achieving Your Lifetime Financial Goals (Prentice Hall, 2003). His textbook Investments (McGraw-Hill, 2009), coauthored by Alex Kane and Alan Marcus, is the market leader and is used in the certification programs of the CFA Institute and the Society of Actuaries. His textbook Financial Economics (Prentice Hall, 2009) is coauthored by Nobel Prize winning economist Robert C. Merton. In 2007, the Retirement Income Industry Association gave Mr. Bodie their Lifetime Achievement in Applied Retirement Research Award.

Jeffrey R. Brown is the William G. Karnes Professor of Finance and director of the Center for Business and Public Policy at the University of Illinois’ College of Business at Urbana-Champaign. He is a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), where he also serves as the associate director of the NBER Retirement Research Center and as the editor of the Tax Policy and the Economy series. He has served on the faculty at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, as a senior economist with the White House Council of Economic Advisers, and as an economist for the President’s Commission to Strengthen Social Security. He was also a Member of the Social Security Advisory Board from 2006 until 2008. Mr. Brown has published extensively on topics related to insurance and retirement income security, and was a cofounder and coeditor of the Journal of Pension Economics and Finance. In 2008, Mr. Brown received the Early Career Scholarly Achievement Award from the American Risk and Insurance Association and the TIAA-CREF Paul A. Samuelson Award for outstanding scholarly writing on lifelong financial security.

Mark J. Browne is the Gerald D. Stephens CPCU Chair in Risk Management and Insurance at the University of Wisconsin School of Business. Previously, he was the president of both the American Risk and Insurance Association and the Risk Theory Society. He was also on the faculty of the University of Georgia. He has served as a consultant to business on issues related to risk management, insurance, and employee benefits. Mr. Browne’s research has appeared in numerous publications, including the Journal of Risk and Insurance, the Journal of Insurance Regulation, and the CPCU Journal. He is an associate editor of the Journal of Risk and Insurance. He teaches courses in risk management, employee benefits, and health insurance. Mr. Browne has received numerous awards, including the Beta Gamma Sigma Dean’s Award for Teaching Excellence, the Lawrence J. Larson Excellence in Teaching Award at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the Shin Award for Research Excellence from the International Insurance Society.

Mark J. Flannery has held an Eminent Scholar Chair in Finance at the University of Florida since 1989. He has also been on the faculty of both the University of North Carolina and the University of Pennsylvania; a visiting faculty member at the London Business School and the University of New South Wales; and a research adviser to the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia. He has published extensively in academic and practitioners‘ finance and economics journals, primarily on issues relating to the management and regulation of financial institutions. He has also studied problems in information economics, capital structure, and asset market equilibrium. Mr. Flannery has consulted with private banks and government agencies, and served on the Board of the Barnett Bank of Alachua County. He served as the editor of the Journal of Money Credit and Banking from 2000 until 2005, and is an associate editor for the Journal of Banking and Finance, the Journal of Financial Intermediation, the Journal of Financial Services Research, The Financial Review, the Review of Quantitative Finance and Accounting, and the Journal of Financial Stability, and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s Quarterly Review. From 1999 until 2002 he served on the Board of Directors of the American Finance Association. Mr. Flannery also served as president and chairman of the board of trustees at the Financial Management Association International. In 2003 he established the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation’s Center for Financial Research and then served as the codirector and a senior adviser until 2008.

Barry Goodwin is the William Neal Reynolds Distinguished Professor in the departments of economics and agricultural and resource economics at North Carolina State University. He has published over a hundred journal articles, a large share of which concern public insurance programs. He coauthored a book with Vince Smith, entitled The Economics of Crop Insurance and Disaster Aid (AEI Press, 1995). He is a fellow at the American Agricultural Economics Association and his work on crop insurance has received wide recognition and is widely cited. He is a consultant for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, private industry, and the World Bank on crop insurance issues.

Martin Halek teaches in the actuarial science, risk management, and insurance department at the University of Wisconsin. His areas of research include risk behavior, insurance economics, social insurance programs, and ratings effects on financial institutions. Prior to assuming this position in January 2008, he was an assistant professor at the University of Georgia and the University of North Carolina–Charlotte. Mr. Halek has published articles in a number of peer-reviewed journals and is a member of several professional organizations. One of Mr. Halek’s recent working papers examines whether increased coastal building standards imposed by federal and state governments are effective in mitigating hurricane losses. This research topic has generated much interest as high-risk coastal areas continue to experience significant growth.

Kevin A. Hassett is the director of economic policy studies and a resident scholar at AEI. He is also a weekly columnist for Bloomberg. Before joining AEI, Mr. Hassett was a senior economist at the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System and an associate professor of economics and finance at Columbia Business School. He was an economic adviser to the George W. Bush campaign in the 2004 presidential election and was the chief economic adviser to Senator John McCain during the 2000 presidential primaries and the 2008 presidential campaign. He has also served as a policy consultant to the U.S. Department of the Treasury during both the former Bush and Clinton administrations. Mr. Hassett is a member of the Joint Committee on Taxation’s Dynamic Scoring Advisory Panel. He is the author, coauthor, or editor of six books on economics and economic policy, including Toward Fundamental Tax Reform (AEI Press, 2005). He has published scholarly articles in the American Economic Review, Economic Journal, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the Review of Economics and Statistics, the Journal of Public Economics, and many other professional journals. Mr. Hassett’s popular writings have been published in the Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic Monthly, USA Today, the Washington Post, and numerous other outlets. His economic commentaries are regularly aired on radio and television, including recent appearances on the Today Show, CBS’s Morning Show, The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, Hardball, Moneyline, and Power Lunch.

Robert Hoyt is the Dudley L. Moore, Jr. Chair of Risk Management and Insurance at the University of Georgia’s Terry College of Business, where he teaches corporate risk management, enterprise risk management, and is the department head for insurance, legal studies, and real estate. His research focuses on corporate hedging, enterprise risk management, catastrophe risk management, the economics of insurance fraud, liability system costs, and insurer insolvency. In 2007 he served as the interim dean of the Terry College and he has been on the University of Georgia’s faculty since 1988. In 1995 he was a Fulbright Visiting Professor of Risk Management at the Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration. His writing has appeared in various scholarly and trade journals, including the Journal of Risk and Insurance, the Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, and the Journal of Law and Economics. Mr. Hoyt has offered expert testimony in litigation relating to pension valuation and insurance contract interpretation and has served as a risk management consultant to various public and private sector organizations, including the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. He has served as the president of the American Risk and Insurance Association, the Risk Theory Society, and the Southern Risk and Insurance Association. Mr. Hoyt serves on the board of directors of the Journal of Insurance Regulation and on the editorial board of Risk Management and Insurance Review.

Dwight Jaffee is the Willis Booth Professor of Banking, Finance, and Real Estate at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, where has taught since 1991. Previously, he taught in the economics department of Princeton University. Mr. Jaffee is a member of the Haas School’s finance and real estate group and is the cochair of the Fisher Center for Real Estate and Urban Economics. His primary areas of research are insurance—earthquakes, terrorism, and auto—and finance. He has served as an adviser to the World Bank, the Federal Reserve System, the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight, and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Howard C. Kunreuther is the Cecilia Yen Koo Professor of Decision Sciences and Public Policy at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and the codirector of the Wharton Risk Management and Decision Processes Center. He researches ways that society can better manage low-probability/high-consequence events related to technological and natural hazards, and he has published extensively on the topic. He is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), a member of the National Earthquake Hazards Reduction Program’s advisory committee on earthquake hazards reduction, and a distinguished fellow of the Society for Risk Analysis. Mr. Kunreuther has written or coedited numerous books and papers, including On Risk and Disaster: Lessons from Hurricane Katrina (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006 with Ronald J. Daniels and Donald F. Kettl), and Catastrophe Modeling: A New Approach to Managing Risk (Springer, 2005, with Patricia Grossi). He received the Elizur Wright Award from the American Association of Risk and Insurance for his significant contribution to the literature of insurance.

Erwann O. Michel-Kerjan is the managing director of the Risk Management and Decision Processes Center at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. His work is focused on managing and financing extreme events, such as natural disasters and terrorist attacks. In 2007, he was named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum. In 2008, Mr. Michel-Kerjan was elected chairman of the High Level Advisory Board of the International Network on Financial Management of Large-Scale Catastrophes of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). From 2003 to 2005 he served on the OECD Task Force on Terrorism Insurance, which published Terrorism Insurance in OECD Countries (OECD Publishing, 2005), a few days before the London bombing in July 2005. He has authored or coauthored more than forty publications at the crux of financial management and global risk governance, and his views regularly appear in leading media outlets. He is the coauthor of Seeds of Disaster, Roots of Response: How Private Action Can Reduce Public Vulnerability (Cambridge University Press, 2006) and At War with the Weather (MIT Press, April 2009).

George Pennacchi is a professor of finance and the codirector of the Office for Banking Research at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is also a research associate at the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland and the program coordinator for deposit insurance at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation’s Center for Financial Research. His research focuses on financial intermediaries and the valuation of fixed-income securities and government guarantees. Currently, Mr. Pennacchi is the managing editor of the Journal of Financial Intermediation and an associate editor of the Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, the Journal of Financial Services Research, and the Journal of Money, Credit and Banking. Previously, he was an associate editor for the Journal of Banking and Finance, the Journal of Finance, the Review of Financial Studies, and Management Science, and a coeditor of Advances in Futures and Options Research. Mr. Pennacchi has consulted for the U.S. Office of Management and Budget, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund. He has been a visiting professor at the Università Bocconi in Milan and was a member of the finance faculty at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School.

Alex J. Pollock has been a resident fellow at AEI since 2004, focusing on financial policy issues, including government-sponsored enterprises, retirement finance, housing finance, corporate governance, accounting standards, and issues raised by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. Previously, he spent thirty-five years in banking, including twelve years as the president and chief executive officer of the Federal Home Loan Bank of Chicago, while also writing numerous articles on financial systems and management. He is a director of Allied Capital Corporation, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, the Great Lakes Higher Education Corporation, the International Union for Housing Finance, and the chairman of the board of the Great Books Foundation.

Thomas R. Russell is an associate professor at Santa Clara University, where he teaches courses in macroeconomics, microeconomics, and decision-making. His numerous scholarly articles have appeared in such publications as the Journal of Economic Theory, the American Economic Review, Economic Letters, the Journal of International Money and Finance, and the Journal of Mathematical Economics. His current research interests include applying differential geometry to the study of rational and nonrational behavior, and the analysis of the relationship between capital markets and insurance markets.

Kent Smetters is an associate professor at University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School and a visiting scholar at AEI. He worked for Congress from 1995 to 1998, before joining the University in Pennsylvania as an assistant professor. He was the Kaiser Visiting Professor of Economics in the economics department at Stanford University during the 2000–2001 academic year. Mr. Smetters was appointed deputy assistant secretary for economic policy of the U.S. Treasury in 2001, where he served until August 2002. He remains active in Washington and recently served as a member of the Blue Ribbon Panel on Dynamic Scoring for the congressional Joint Committee on Taxation.

Vincent Smith is a professor of economics in the departments of agricultural economics and economics and the codirector of the Agricultural Marketing Policy Center at Montana State University. His research examines agricultural trade and domestic policy issues, with a particular focus on agricultural science policy, domestic and world commodity markets, risk management, and agricultural trade policy. He has authored nine books and monographs and published over one hundred articles. His work has been recognized nationally through numerous awards for outstanding research programs. In 2008, he became a distinguished scholar of the Western Agricultural Economics Association (the Association’s highest award for scholarly accomplishment).

Robert L. Thompson holds the Gardner Endowed Chair in Agricultural Policy at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He also serves on the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA)-U.S. Trade Representative agricultural policy advisory committee for trade, and the International Food & Agricultural Trade Policy Council. From 1998 until2002 he was at the World Bank, where he served as the director of agriculture and rural development. Mr. Thompson has also served as the president and chief executive officer of the Winrock International Institute for Agricultural Development (1993-98); as the dean of agriculture (1987-93) and a professor of agricultural economics (1974-93) at Purdue University; as the assistant secretary for economics at the USDA (1985-87); and as a senior staff economist for food and agriculture at the President’s Council of Economic Advisers (1983-85). He is a fellow of the American Agricultural Economics Association and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

David Torregrosa is an analyst in the Macroeconomic Analysis Division at the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). He is the coauthor, with Kent Smetters, of "Financing Losses from Catastrophic Risks," a discussion paper published by the Hamilton Project at the Brookings Institution in June 2008. A revised version of that paper was also released as a CBO working paper.

View Event Details