Municipal Finance Conference

The Municipal Finance Conference aims to bring together academics, practitioners, issuers, and regulators to discuss recent research on municipal capital markets and state and local fiscal issues.

2022 Conference｜About the Organizers｜Advisory Committee ｜Newsletter｜ Past Conferences｜Questions

2022 CONFERENCE

The 2022 conference was held virtually on July 18, 19, and 20. The papers, slides, and videos of the presentations and panels are available here.

ABOUT THE ORGANIZERS

Daniel Bergstresser is Associate Professor of Finance at the Brandeis International Business School. Bergstresser’s research focuses on municipal finance and on the impact of taxation, regulation, and market structure on financial markets. This research has been published in the Journal of Law and Economics, the Journal of Financial Economics, The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Review of Financial Studies, and the Journal of Public Economics, and has been widely cited in both the academic and business press. He earned a Ph.D. in Economics at MIT, and earned an A.B. at Stanford. In addition to his service at Brandeis, Bergstresser has also served as an Associate Professor at Harvard Business School, as Head of the European Credit Research group at Barclays Global Investors, and on the research staff of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System.

Justin Marlowe is a Research Professor at the University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy. His research and teaching are focused on public financial management, and he has published four books – including the first open-access textbook on public financial management – and dozens of articles on public capital markets, infrastructure finance, government financial disclosure, and public-private private partnerships. Since 2017 he has served as Editor-in-Chief of Public Budgeting & Finance. He is active as an expert witness and has served on technical advisory bodies for several government, private, and non-profit organizations. Prior to academia he worked in local government in Michigan. He is a Certified Government Financial Manager and an elected Fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration, and he holds a Ph.D. in political science and public administration from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

Richard Ryffel is a part-time Professor of Finance Practice at Washington University in St. Louis’ Olin Business School. During his 30-year career in investment banking and asset management, Mr. Ryffel advised colleges and universities, hospitals, cities, states, airports, school districts, and corporations on financings and capital structure, and led hundreds of financings in both the taxable and tax-exempt markets. He previously worked at A.G. Edwards (now Wells Fargo Advisors), Bank of America, Edward Jones and J.P. Morgan. In 2012, while in industry, he conceived and launched the Municipal Finance Conference with Professor Daniel Bergstresser of Brandeis University.

Louise Sheiner is a senior fellow in Economic Studies and policy director for the Hutchins Center on Fiscal and Monetary Policy. She had served as an economist with the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System since 1993, most recently as the senior economist in the Fiscal Analysis Section for the Research and Statistics Division. (At the 2013 municipal finance conference, Sheiner and Byron Lutz at the Fed presented their work on state and local retiree health obligations.) She also has served as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Economic Policy at the U.S. Department of the Treasury (1996), and served as Senior Staff Economist for the Council of Economic Advisers (1995-96). Before joining the Fed, Sheiner was an economist at the Joint Committee on Taxation.

David Wessel is director of the Hutchins Center on Fiscal and Monetary Policy, which provides independent, non-partisan analysis of fiscal and monetary policy issues in order to further public understanding and to improve the quality and effectiveness of those policies. He joined Brookings in December 2013 after 30 years on the staff of The Wall Street Journal where, most recently, he was economics editor and wrote the weekly Capital column. He is a contributing correspondent to The Wall Street Journal, appears frequently on NPR’s Morning Edition and tweets often at @davidmwessel.

advisory committee

David Abel, Columbia Capital Management
Chris Berry, University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy
Tim Coffin, Breckinridge Capital Advisors
Christine Cuny, NYU Stern School of Business
Joe Fichera, Saber Partners
Mark Funkhouser, Funkhouser & Associates
Allen Garman, Maryland Transportation Authority
Daniel Garrett, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania
Tracy Gordon, Urban Institute
Nikki Griffith, Finance Department of City of Chesapeake, Virginia
Craig Johnson, O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs, Indiana University-Bloomington
Andy Kalotay, Andrew Kalotay Associates
Mark Kim, Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board
Brian Knight, Brown University
Byron Lutz, Federal Reserve Board
Colin MacNaught, BondLink
Michael Nadol, PFM Group Consulting LLC
Carol O’Cleireacain, School of International & Public Affairs, Columbia University
Peter Orr, Intuitive Analytics
Kim Rueben, Urban Institute
Ivan Samstein, University of Chicago
Daniel Shoag, Harvard Kennedy School of Government
Win Smith, Wells Fargo
Sarah Snyder, Ramirez & Co., Inc.
Bryan Sullivan, State of Delaware
J. Ben Watkins, State of Florida
Bradley Wendt, Charles River Associates
Nancy Winkler, (formerly) City of Philadelphia
Stephen Winterstein, MarketAxess Holdings Inc.
Stephen Wood, Stephen A. Wood Consulting

PAST CONFERENCES

See also: 2021 webinar – “The COVID-19 pandemic and state and local budgets: Past, present, and future”

QUESTIONS

Please direct any questions regarding conference registration, logistics, etc. to Stephanie Cencula (scencula@brookings.edu) or Haowen Chen (HNChen@brookings.edu)