Zvi Bodie is a financial economist, an educator, writer, speaker, and consultant on finance and the financial system. He taught finance at Boston University for 43 years, has published widely on pension finance and investment strategy in leading professional journals, and is best known for applying modern financial theory to lifecycle saving and investing. Among his books on pensions are Foundations of Pension Finance, Pensions in the U.S. Economy, Issues in Pension Economics, and Financial Aspects of the U.S. Pension System. His textbook, Investments, coauthored with Alex Kane and Alan Marcus, is used in all the major business schools around the globe and has been translated into 10 languages in addition to English. With Nobel Laureate in Economics, Robert C. Merton, Bodie co-authored an introductory textbook Financial Economics which has been translated into 9 languages. His books for the mass market are Worry Free Investing and Risk Less and Prosper. In 2007 the Retirement Income Industry Association gave Bodie their Lifetime Achievement Award for applied research. And in 2019, the Plan Sponsors Council of America selected him for their lifetime achievement award. Bodie holds a PhD in economics (1975) from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, an M.A. in Economics (1970) from the Hebrew University, and a B.A. with Honors in Philosophy (1965) from Brooklyn College. See https://zvibodie.com
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Robert I. Lerman (Bob) is an economist best known for his work on promoting apprenticeship in the US, his research on unwed fathers, and his studies of income inequality. He is currently an Institute Fellow at Urban Institute, Emeritus Professor of Economics at American University, and Research Fellow at IZA. His 1990 publication with Hillard Pouncy, “The compelling case for youth apprenticeship” and his subsequent studies for the Progressive Policy Institute influenced public policy, ultimately leading to School-to-Work Opportunities Act of 1994 and to recent initiatives of the Obama, Trump and Biden Administrations to expand apprenticeships. His articles and co-edited book on young unwed fathers provided the first quantitative examination of the factors associated with young fathers. His collaborations with Professor Shlomo Yitzhaki led to new ways to examine income inequality by income source and by population subgroup.
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Dr. Lerman has testified before the US Congress on youth apprenticeship, child support, and unwed fatherhood. He currently serves as principal investigator on the Evaluation of the American Apprenticeship Initiative and on the Youth Apprenticeship Intermediaries that involves working with employers to start and expand youth apprenticeships. See https://www.urban.org/author/robert-i-lerman
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Meir Kohn is a Professor of Economics at Dartmouth College. He has published books on finance and money and banking as well as journal articles on monetary policy, finance, economic growth and research and development. He is currently working on a book that develops a new approach to understanding economic development and growth: a partial draft is availabe at https://sites.dartmouth.edu/mkohn/commpredprod. Kohn holds a Ph.D. in Economics from M.I.T, and a B.Sc. and M.Sc. in agricultural economics from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His website is https://sites.dartmouth.edu/mkohn/.
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Leonard Hausman is co-founder of Boston Healthcare Ventures (BHV). He has developed business projects with China, Israel, and the Gulf Cooperation Council. Before his involvement with business ventures, he taught economics and developed academic research centers at Brandeis University and at Harvard University, and developed an East Asia program at the Sloan School at MIT. From 1988 to 1998, Hausman founded and directed the Institute for Social and Economic Policy in the Middle East at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. The Institute exerted a substantial impact on the economic aspects of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. Dr. Hausman co-authored with Stanley Fischer, Anna Karasik Thurow, and Thomas C. Schelling Securing Peace in the Middle East: Project on Economic Transition (MIT Press). The Institute developed the Middle East Educational Fellowship Program that brought about 100 mid-career Arabs and Israelis to take master’s degrees
From 1988 to1993, Hausman was the founder and Director of the East Asia Management Studies Center at the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Hausman worked under and closely with Lester Thurow, then dean of the Sloan School, to launch three very large projects--with Singapore, Taiwan, and China.
At Brandeis, he launched a master’s program in the management of human services, an education program on employee benefits (as the private component of the social protection system), and related policy research centers; and obtained funding, private and large-scale, for a health policy research center.
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Jack Habib is professor emeritus of economics and social work at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and retired director of the Myers-JDC-Brookdale Institute. He writes and lectures extensively on economics and social developments in Israel. He is the author of numerous books and articles in the field of social welfare in Israel and internationally. After immigrating to Israel in 1971, he led a research team at Israel’s Social Security Administration, carrying out the first national study of poverty in Israel. The significant poverty revealed in the study came as a shock to a country founded by leaders with a socialist orientation. It led to the establishment of a national commission that prepared a comprehensive multi–dimensional set of recommendations that led to a revolution in social policy in Israel. In 1974, Dr. Habib helped found the JDC- Brookdale Institute, as a partnership between the Israeli government and a major American Jewish organization, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (AJJDC). In its role assisting Jewish populations in need, the JDC had long been committed to Israel’s social development. Social research was at the time in its infancy in Israel.
As director of what subsequently became The Myers-JDC-Brookdale Institute, he led its successful effort in becoming the leading center for applied social research serving Israel and the Jewish world. He worked closely with the Jewish Federations of North America and with organizations and Foundations around the world on programming in Israel and the social service systems in other countries. The Institute initially addressed issues of aging but eventually expanded to address the full range of major social challenges. Under Dr. Habib’s leadership, the Institute built a diverse interdisciplinary staff and a focus on national policy development. Its overriding focus was on making the link between research and policy and promoting integrated inter-ministerial responses to social issues. The institute gave special attention to minority groups in Israel such as the significant Arab minority or to the unique challenge of integrating the waves of Jewish immigrants from Ethiopia. Dr. Habib also served on the faculty of the Hebrew university with a joint appointment in the departments of economics and social work before retiring in 2015. He earned a BA degree from Brandeis University and a PhD in economics from Harvard University.
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Deborah Lucas is the Sloan Distinguished Professor of Finance at the MIT Sloan School of Management and Director of the MIT Golub Center for Finance and Policy. Her current research focuses on developing and applying financial economics to evaluate the costs and risks of governments’ financial activities. She is also widely published in the fields of asset pricing and corporate finance. Lucas is a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, a Term Professor at the PBC School of Finance at Tsinghua University and a member of the Shadow Open Market Committee. She serves on advisory boards for the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and the Urban Institute, on the editorial board of the Annual Review of Financial Economics, and as an associate editor and for the American Economic Journal Policy. She is a board member of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and a consultant for the OECD and the Congressional Budget Office. She is an elected member of the National Academy of Public Administration and the National Academy of Social Insurance.
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Previous appointments include chief economist, and subsequently assistant and associate director at the U.S. Congressional Budget Office, member of the Social Security Technical Advisory Panel, senior staff economist for U.S. Council of Economic Advisers, Professor at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, and co-editor of the JMCB. An expert on federal credit programs, she has testified before the U.S. Congress on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, student loans, and strategically important financial institutions. Lucas received her BA, MA, and a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Chicago. An example of her recent work includes the following article on public projects. https://www.nber.org/books-and-chapters/economic-analysis-and-infrastructure-investment/fair-value-approach-valuing-public-infrastructure-projects-and-risk-transfer-public-private
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Eugene Steuerle is an Institute fellow and the Richard B. Fisher Chair at the Urban Institute. Among past positions, he was deputy assistant secretary of the US Department of the Treasury for Tax Analysis (1987–89), president of the National Tax Association (2001–02), co-director of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, chair of the 1999 Technical Panel advising Social Security on its methods and assumptions, and chair of the 2015–16 National Academy of Sciences Committee on Advancing the Power of Economic Evidence to Inform Investments in Children, Youth, and Families. Between 1984 and 1986, he was the economic coordinator and original organizer of the Treasury’s tax reform effort. Steuerle is the author, coauthor, or co-editor of 18 books, including Dead Men Ruling, Nonprofits and Government (3rd edition), Contemporary US Tax Policy (2nd edition), and Advancing the Power of Economic Evidence to Inform Investments in Children, Youth, and Families.
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He is a founder and chair emeritus of ACT for Alexandria, a community foundation, and is or has been an elected, appointed, advisory panel, or board member for the Congressional Budget Office, Comptroller General of the United States, the Joint Committee on Taxation, Venture Philanthropy Partners, and the National Center on Philanthropy and the Law (chair).
Steuerle received the first Bruce Davie–Albert Davis Public Service Award from the National Tax Association in 2005, distinguished or outstanding alumnus awards from the University of Dayton and St. Xavier High School, and the TIAA-CREF Paul Samuelson award for his book Dead Men Ruling. His personal blog is The Government We Deserve at
https://blog.governmentwedeserve.org/
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Tamar Jacoby is president of Opportunity America, a Washington-based nonprofit working to promote economic mobility – work, skills, careers, ownership, and entrepreneurship for poor and working Americans. She has conducted a range of studies and moderated panels on the US system of postsecondary education and training. Among them are The indispensable institution: Taking the measure of community college workforce education (2021) and (co-authored with Ron Haskins) Kentucky FAME: Fulfilling the promise of apprenticeship. Tamar is also well-known for her writing and advocacy on immigration-related issues. She created and served as president and CEO of ImmigrationWorks USA, an organization self-described as "a national federation of small business owners working to advance better immigration law." A former journalist and author, she was a senior writer and justice editor at Newsweek and, from 1981 to 1987, the deputy editor of The New York Times op-ed page. Her articles have appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Weekly Standard and Foreign Affairs, among other publications. She is the author of Someone Else’s House: America’s Unfinished Struggle for Integration (Basic Books 1998). Her edited volumes include Reinventing the Melting Pot: The New Immigrants and What It Means To Be American (Basic Books 2004) and This Way Up: New Thinking About Poverty and Economic Mobility (AEI 2018)
Tamar has served on the National Council on the Humanities, the advisory board to the National Endowment for the Humanities. In addition to her written work and studies, Ms. Jacoby has also taught at various educational institutions, including Cooper Union, The New School For Social Research, New York University, and Yale University. She is a recipient of the 2010/2011 Berlin Prize Fellowship from the American Academy in Berlin. Jacoby also won an Alicia Patterson Journalism Fellowship in 1974 to research and write about "What happened to racial integration in the United States."
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Yair Stern is an Israeli journalist, former director of the Israel Broadcasting Authority and former chairman of the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra. He began his career in the media as a sports reporter for the Maariv newspaper. After studying abroad, he returned to Israel and served as a sports reporter for Channel 1. In 1982, he became editor-in-chief of the Evening News. Under his leadership, the division received the highest journalistic award in Israel, the Sokolov Prize, for coverage of the war in Lebanon. In 1989, Yair became the Washington bureau chief for Israel TV. His coverage of the Gulf War in 1991 garnered the Israel Broadcasting Authority Excellence Award. In 1993, he became director-general of Israeli television. He chaired both the Israeli Chief Editors Group and of Israel’s TV Rating Supervision Board, served as a member of the News Committee of the European Broadcasting Union, which strives for better international cooperation between news divisions on the continent. He also was a member of the Academy of the International Emmy Awards. Yair received a special award for producing the Eurovision Song Contest in Jerusalem in 1999. In 2001, he headed a national committee to supervise the founding of a second commercial TV channel in Israel. In 2003, he chaired a task force to save Israeli educational TV. From 2004 to 2006, he was programming advisor to the Israeli FCC for cable and satellite channels. In 2008, he was appointed a member of the public board of the Israeli New Film and Television Foundation.
Yair is the son of Avraham Stern, who was the leader of the Zionist group named Lehi. He serves as chairman of the Association for the Commemoration of the Lehi Heritage. He holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Political science from Tel Aviv University and a master's degree in media, from Temple University. He was named to the 2008 Alumni Hall of Fame of the Klein College of Media and Communication at Temple.
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Tom Bewick is the chief executive of the Federation of Awarding Bodies (FAB) - the collective voice of the UK’s awarding and assessment industry. Tom is passionate about the value of qualifications. He left school initially with just one pass grade at 'O' level - the equivalent of one GCSE. But thanks to night school he went on to achieve a world-class bachelor's degree and a European public policy master's from the University of Bath/University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. Before his appointment in May 2018, Tom led various initiatives in the skills arena spanning a 25-year career. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, he advised ministers on a range of post-16 education reforms, including the creation of sector skills councils. As chief executive of the creative and cultural industries skills council from 2003-2010, Tom campaigned for changes to the apprenticeship system which led to the first creative apprenticeships being introduced to the sector. From 2011, Tom worked as a skills policy expert in the international arena, working on major development projects in places like Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, and Lebanon.
In 2013, Tom' worked with the Urban Institute, joining a team advising the U.S. Department of Labor on the expansion of American apprenticeships. As founder of the Transatlantic Apprenticeship Exchange Forum (TAEF) and co-founder of the U.S.-based firm, Franklin Apprenticeships, Tom continues to be recognized for his published works and policy influence on both sides of the Atlantic. Tom hosts the #SkillsWorldLive Radio Show and interviews some of the leading figures shaping the post-compulsory education and skills systems, including apprenticeships. The show brings people together in the world of Further Education in the UK and carries weekly interviews with special guests working in developing the skills sector. The program deals with the key issues affecting employers, learners, providers and awarding bodies, along with top tunes from the 80s, 90s, and 2000s. Tom is a frequent commentator on the new UK network, GBNews.
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Allison Schrager is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a City Journal contributing editor, where her research focuses on public finance, pensions, tax policy, labor markets, and monetary policy. She is co-founder of LifeCycle Finance Partners, LLC, a risk advisory firm. Allison is the author An Economist Walks Into a Brothel (2019, Penguin Books). Her recent commentaries for the Manhattan Institute include: Idle Now, Pay Later: The young should think twice before joining the so-called no-work movement, Where Are All the Gig Workers and What Are They Doing? Baseball Lockout Shows What's Wrong With a Superstar Economy.
Previously, Schrager was a journalist at Quartz, led retirement product innovation at Dimensional Fund Advisors, and consulted for international organizations, including the OECD and IMF. She has been a regular contributor to the Economist, Reuters, and Bloomberg Businessweek, and her writing has also appeared in Playboy, Wired, National Review, Foreign Affairs, and City Journal. She received her undergraduate degree from the University of Edinburgh and a Ph.D. in Economics from Columbia University.
Dallas Salisbury is Resident Fellow and President Emeritus at the Employee Benefit Research Institute (EBRI). He had joined EBRI on December 4th, 1978, as Chief Staff Executive, after EBRI was founded by 13 employee benefit consulting firms on September 28th, 1978. Dallas has served on many commissions, study panels, editorial advisory boards, and consulted with public and private organizations of all types. Dallas is a Fellow of the National Academy of Human Resources. He currently serves as a member of the Board of Advisors to the Comptroller General of the United States. He is a past member of the PBGC Advisory Committee (having served for six years as an appointee of President H.W Bush and more recently for six years as an appointee of President Barack Obama) and of the Board of the National Academy of Resources (NAHR), the NAHR Foundation, the Securities and Exchange Commission Investor Advisory Committee, the Board of Directors of the FINRA Investor Education Foundation, on the Secretary of Labor's ERISA Advisory Council, Board of Directors of the Society for Human Resources Management, U.S. Advisory Panel on Medicare Education, the Board of Directors of the National Academy of Social Insurance, in addition to others over his 40+ years of work on employee benefit, health and financial security issues.
Dallas is a Fellow of the National Academy of Human Resources, with the Award for Professional Excellence from the Society for Human Resource Management, the Plan Sponsor Lifetime Achievement Award, the Keystone Award of WorldatWork, the Public Service Award of the International Foundation of Employee Benefit Plans, and the Harry T. Eidson Founders Award from the American Society of Pension Actuaries and Administrators (ASPPA, part of the American Retirement Association). Mr. Salisbury received a 2007 National Emmy Award for SavingsmanTM and the Choose to Save® public education program. He has written and lectured extensively on economic security topics. His books include Retirement Security in the United States: Current Sources, Future Prospects, and Likely Outcomes of Current Trends, The Future of Retirement Income in America, The Future of Social Insurance: Incremental Action or Fundamental Reform?, IRA and 401(k) Investing and Managing Money in Retirement. Prior to joining EBRI, Mr. Salisbury held full-time positions with the Washington State Legislature, the U.S. Department of Justice, the Employee Benefits Security Administration of the U.S. Department of Labor, and the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC). He holds a B.A. in Finance from the University of Washington and an M.P.A. from the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs.
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