The Center for Business and Public Policy - University of Illinois, College of Business

Faculty Associates


	Kathy Baylis - Faculty Profile Page Kathy Baylis is an assistant professor in Agriculture and Consumer Economics at the University of Illinois. She joined the department after several years as an assistant professor at the University of British Columbia where she is still an adjunct. She earned her PhD from the University of California at Berkeley in 2003, where she specialized in agriculture and trade issues. Kathy has worked in agricultural policy in both Canada and the United States. In 2001/02, she was the staff economist in charge of agriculture for the Council of Economic Advisors in the White House, and in the mid-1990s, she worked as Executive Secretary with the National Farmers Union in Canada. She has published a number of journal articles on agricultural trade and environmental policy and has coauthored a textbook on Canadian-U.S. agricultural policy.
	Jeffrey R. Brown - Faculty Profile Page Director, Center for Business and Public Policy Jeff Brown is the William Karnes Professor of Finance in the College of Business at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He also serves as Director of the College of Business' Center on Business and Public Policy, and as Associate Director of the NBER Retirement Research Center. Prior to joining the Illinois faculty, Dr. Brown was an assistant professor of public policy at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. During 2001-2002, he served as Senior Economist at the White House Council of Economic Advisers, where he focused primarily on Social Security, pension reform, and terrorism risk insurance. During 2001 he also served on the staff of the President’s Commission to Strengthen Social Security. In 2006, President Bush nominated, and the Senate confirmed, Dr. Brown as a member of the Social Security Advisory Board. Professor Brown holds a Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a Masters of Public Policy from Harvard University, and a B.A. from Miami University. He is a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, a Faculty Affiliate of the Institute on Government and Policy Affairs, and a Fellow of the TIAA-CREF Institute, the Employee Benefits Research Institute, and the China Center for Insurance and Social Security Research. Professor Brown is a member of the American Economic Association, the American Risk and Insurance Association, and the National Academy of Social Insurance. Professor Brown has published extensively on public and private insurance markets, including publications in The American Economic Review, The Journal of Political Economy, The Journal of Public Economics, The Journal of Monetary Economics, The Journal of Risk and Insurance, The National Tax Journal, and numerous books. He is the recipient of the Lumina Award for Outstanding Research in Insurance and E-Commerce. Professor Brown is co-author of the book The Role of Annuities in Financing Retirement from MIT Press, and is co-founder of the Journal of Pension Economics and Finance, published by Cambridge University Press. He has served as a consultant / expert panel member for the Executive Office of the President of the U.S., the General Accounting Office, the U.S. Treasury, the World Bank, and several private firms. Prior to graduate school, he was a Brand Manager at the Procter & Gamble Company.
	Kristine Brown - Faculty Profile Page Kristine Brown concentrates in the fields of Labor Economics and Public Finance. Her research examines how the structure of employment benefits affects the labor market decisions of older workers and the well-being of the aged. In a recent project, she exploited reforms to a state employees' retirement program to investigate the relationship between pension financial incentives and retirement timing.
	Tatyana Deryugina- Faculty Profile Page Tatyana Deryugina is a Lecturer of Finance in the College of Business. Her research focuses on environmental economics and include evaluating the local economic impact of hurricanes in the US, studying how people's beliefs about global warming are affected by local weather fluctuations, and estimating the degree of adverse selection in area yield insurance in the United States. Tatyana did her graduate economic studies at MIT. She also hold a BA in Applied Math and a BS in Environmental Economics in Policy, both from UC Berkeley.
	Dhammika Dharmapala - Faculty Profile Page Dhammika Dharmapala is a Professor of Law and a Professor of Finance (by courtesy) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He received a PhD in Economics from the University of California at Berkeley and an undergraduate degree from the University of Western Australia. He was previously a Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University, a John M. Olin Visiting Fellow in Law and Economics at Georgetown University Law Center, a Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan, and an Assistant and Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Connecticut. His research interests include corporate and international taxation, taxes and corporate governance, and the economic analysis of law.
	Don Fullerton - Faculty Profile Page Don Fullerton received a BA from Cornell in 1974 and a PhD in Economics from U.C. Berkeley in 1978. He taught at Princeton University (1978-84), the University of Virginia (1984-91), Carnegie Mellon University (1991-94) and the University of Texas (1994-2008), before joining the University of Illinois in 2008. From 1985 to 1987, he served in the U.S. Treasury Department as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Tax Analysis. His early research in public economics focused on computable general equilibrium models of taxation, marginal effective tax rates, the marginal cost of public funds, and distributional effects of taxes on a lifetime basis. Recent research includes the distributional effects of social security. In environmental and energy economics, he works on household disposal of garbage and recycling, policies for green design, vehicle emission control policies, carbon taxes, and other second-best policies in the energy sector where direct environmental taxes are not feasible.
	J. Fred Giertz - Faculty Profile Page Fred Giertz teaches courses in public finance and public sector economics. Research focuses on public finance, public choice, and regional economic development. Specializes in state and local taxation and expenditure analysis in regional economic development issues. Advisor to: the Illinois Bureau of Budget, since 1991; the Illinois Department of Commerce and Community Affairs, 1993; Governor Edgar's Transition Team, 1990-91. Has served as a tax and revenue consultant to many Illinois government commissions and offices.
	David A. Hyman - Faculty Profile Page David Hyman, the Richard W. and Marie L. Corman Professor, is considered to be one of the country’s top health law scholars, teaches civil procedure and health care regulation. His principal research interests are the regulation of health care financing and delivery and empirical law and economics. Professor Hyman has published articles on a wide range of subjects, including medical malpractice, managed care, consumer protection, narrative, professional responsibility, tax exemption, and civil procedure. Professor Hyman has been a Visiting Professor at the University of Texas and George Washington University Schools of Law, and a Professor at the University of Maryland School of Law. He is a member of the American Law Institute and was the chair of the section of law and social sciences of the American Association of Law Schools. Professor Hyman served for three years as Special Counsel to the Federal Trade Commission, where he was responsible for coordinating hearings and a major report on health care and competition law and policy. He is on the editorial board of the American Journal of Law & Medicine, and is an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute. He is admitted to practice before the 6th, 7th and 10th Circuit Courts of Appeal, and the United States Tax Court, and is a member of the bars of Illinois and the District of Columbia.
	Charles M. Kahn - Faculty Profile Page Charles Kahn is the Bailey Professor of Finance and Professor of Economics at the University of Illinois. He received his Ph. D. in economics from Harvard University. He has published extensively in economics and finance journals on issues in the economics of asymmetric information and its effects on institutional arrangements. He has been a National Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, a Visiting Fellow at the Australian National University, an Overseas Fellow at Churchill College of Cambridge University. He has served as a consultant to the Bank for International Settlements on inter-authority coordination of bank regulation and as a consultant at central banks, including the Federal Reserve Banks of Atlanta, Cleveland, and New York, the European Central Bank, and the Bank of England, where he has researched incentive effects of payment and settlement systems.
	Richard Kaplan - Faculty Profile Page Professor Richard Kaplan, the Peer and Sarah Pedersen Professor of Law, graduated from Indiana University with highest honors and earned his law degree from Yale University. He practiced law in Houston with Baker & Botts, specializing in U.S. tax consequences of international transactions, before joining the faculty in 1979. An internationally recognized expert on U.S. taxation and tax policy, he has lectured in these areas on three continents, testified before the U.S. Congress on several occasions, and written innovative course books on income taxation and international taxation. Professor Kaplan developed one of the first law school courses on Elder Law, an emerging specialty dealing with the legal implications of extended life, and is the co-author of Elder Law in a Nutshell (4th ed. 2006). He has served as faculty advisor for the Elder Law Journal since its inception in 1992. He has also been recognized with the Outstanding Professor in the College of Law several times and has received the Campus Award for Excellence in Graduate and Professional Teaching at the University of Illinois. Professor Kaplan is a Fellow of the Employee Benefits Research Institute and a member of the National Academy of Social Insurance. He served on a 12-member panel on The Future of the Health Care Labor Force in a Graying Society, chaired by former U.S. Secretary of Labor Lynn Martin. In 2002, he was a delegate to the National Summit on Retirement Savings organized by the U.S. Department of Labor.
	Ron Laschever - Faculty Profile Page Ron Laschever is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Economics and the School of Labor and Employment Relations. His fields of interest are Labor Economics and Applied Econometrics. He received his B.A. in Mathematics from Brooklyn College CUNY, and his M.A. and Ph.D. in Economics from Northwestern University. His dissertation, Social Interactions and Labor Market Outcomes of War Veterans, received an Honorable Mention at the 2008 W.E. Upjohn Institute Dissertation Award. His recent research examines how social networks affect labor market outcomes, such as employment, choice of occupation, and retirement decisions. He also examines the effect of benchmarking and salary comparisons on executive compensation. His research has been funded by grants from Northwestern University, the Center for Population Economics at the University of Chicago GSB, and the NBER Retirement Research Center.
	Darren Lubotsky - Faculty Profile Page Darren Lubotsky is an Associate Professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He has been at the University of Illinois since 2002 and currently holds appointments in the Department of Economics, Institute of Government and Public Affairs, and School of Labor and Employment Relations. From 2000 to 2002 he was a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Princeton University. He received his Ph.D. in Economics from the University of California at Berkeley in 2000. Most of his research falls within the broad areas of immigration to the United States, the health and cognitive development of children, and health and health insurance more generally.
	Nolan Miller - Faculty Profile Page Nolan Miller is a Professor of Finance at the University of Illinois. He studies the economics of information and incentives across a wide range of topics, including healthcare, the environment, economic development, insurance, industrial organization and competitive strategy, and his work on these issues has been published in journals such as The American Economic Review, The Journal of Health Economics, Management Science, and the RAND Journal of Economics, among others. He currently serves as an associate editor of The Review of Economics and Statistics and the Berkeley Electronic Journals in Theoretical Economics. Prior to coming to the University of Illinois in 2009, he was an Associate Professor of Public Policy at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. He received his Ph.D. from Northwestern University’s J.L. Kellogg Graduate School of Management and holds bachelor’s degrees in economics (Wharton) and philosophy from the University of Pennsylvania.
	George G. Pennacchi - Faculty Profile Page George Pennacchi is a professor of finance and a co-director of the Office for Banking Research at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Also, he is the Program Coordinator for Deposit Insurance at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation's Center for Financial Research and is a Research Associate at the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland. His research focuses on financial intermediaries and the valuation of fixed-income securities and government guarantees. Currently, he 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 co-editor of Advances in Futures and Options Research. His consulting experience includes work 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, Italy, and was a member of the finance faculty at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Mr. Pennacchi received a Sc.B. degree in applied mathematics from Brown University in 1977 and a Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1984.
	Elizabeth Powers - Faculty Profile Page Elizabeth Powers is a professor of Economics and Public Policy at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Prior to joining the University of Illinois in 1996, Elizabeth was an economist with the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland and a junior staff economist with President George H.W. Bush's Council of Economic Advisers. She holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Pennsylvania and a B.A. in Economics from Vassar College. Elizabeth is the author of numerous peer-reviewed journal articles and serves on the editorial board of National Tax Journal. Much of Elizabeth’s research investigates the impact of public programs on behavior. Her work on the effects of child health on maternal labor supply has been widely cited. Ongoing research projects are in the areas of child well-being, work disability, and developmental disabilities. Elizabeth is currently advising the Donors Forum Public/Nonprofit Partnership Imitative on the development of principles for state contracting with private nonprofit human service providers. She also serves as a consultant to the Inter-American Development Bank on early child development.
	Scott Weisbenner - Faculty Profile Page Scott Weisbenner is an associate professor (tenured) in the Department of Finance and a James F. Towey Faculty Fellow. He earned a Ph.D. in economics from MIT and has been on the Illinois faculty since 2000. Before coming to Illinois, he worked as an economist for the Federal Reserve Board of Governors in the capital markets section. Professor Weisbenner has been a research fellow at the National Bureau of Research (NBER) since 2002. Professor Weisbenner teachers MBA courses in corporate finance and behavioral finance. His research interests include household portfolio decisions and how they are influenced by taxation and psychological factors, issues concerning retirement saving and pension plans, and corporate financial policy. He has published articles in leading finance and economics journals, including The American Economic Review, The Journal of Finance, The Journal of Financial Economics, The Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, The Journal of Public Economics, The Review of Economics and Statistics, and The Review of Financial Studies and his work has been cited in numerous news publications including Barron’s, Business Week, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, Smart Money, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The Washington Times.

College of Business: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign