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Omni Hotel, Amelia Island, Florida

Keynote Speakers

Simon Johnson is the Ronald A. Kurtz Professor of Entrepreneurship at the MIT Sloan School of Management, where he is also head of the Global Economics and Management group and chair of the Sloan Fellows MBA Program Committee. He cofounded and currently leads the Global Entrepreneurship Lab course. Johnson works closely with MIT's Digital Currency Initiative, supervising research projects related to blockchain technology. He is also a cofounder of the Blockchain Lab course. Johnson is a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington DC, a cofounder of BaselineScenario.com, and a member since inception of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation's Systemic Resolution Advisory Committee. From July 2014 to 2017, Johnson was a member of the Financial Research Advisory Committee of the U.S. Treasury's Office of Financial Research, within which he chaired the Global Vulnerabilities Working Group. Johnson has been a member of the private sector Systemic Risk Council since its founding in 2012. From April 2009 to April 2015, he was a member of the Congressional Budget Office's Panel of Economic Advisers. From March 2007 through August 2008, Johnson was the International Monetary Fund's chief economist and director of its research department. Johnson holds a BA in economics and politics from the University of Oxford, an MA in economics from the University of Manchester, and a PhD in economics from MIT.

Donald H. Layton is the chief executive officer of Freddie Mac, a government-sponsored enterprise chartered by Congress to provide liquidity, stability, and affordability to the U.S. housing finance market. He worked for nearly 30 years at JPMorgan Chase and its predecessors before retiring in 2004. From 2007 to 2009, he served as chairman and then chief executive officer of E*TRADE Financial. He was a senior advisor to the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association from 2006 to 2008 and serves as chairman emeritus of the board of the Partnership for the Homeless, a nonprofit dedicated to reducing homelessness in New York City, after having been its chair for nearly a decade. Layton received simultaneous bachelor's and master's degrees in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an MBA from Harvard Business School.

Jerome H. Powell is chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve and serves as chairman of the Federal Open Market Committee. Powell has served as a member of the Board of Governors since 2012. Prior to his appointment to the Board, he was a visiting scholar at the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington, DC, where he focused on federal and state fiscal issues. From 1997 through 2005, Powell was a partner at The Carlyle Group. He served as an assistant secretary and as undersecretary of the U.S. Treasury under President George H.W. Bush. Prior to joining the Bush administration, he worked as a lawyer and investment banker in New York City. In addition to service on corporate boards, Powell has served on the boards of charitable and educational institutions, including the Bendheim Center for Finance at Princeton University and The Nature Conservancy. He received a degree in politics from Princeton University and a law degree from Georgetown University.

Other Speaker Biographies

John Abowd is the U.S. Census Bureau's associate director for research and methodology and chief scientist. His association with the Census Bureau began in 1998 when he joined the team of distinguished research fellows that helped found the longitudinal employer-household dynamics program. In 2008, he led the team that created the world's first application of a differentially private protection system for the program's OnTheMap job location tool. He is currently leading the agency's efforts to create a differentially private protection system for the 2020 census and future data products. Abowd joined the faculty of Cornell University's School of Industrial and Labor Relations in 1987. He is the Edmund Ezra Day Professor of economics, statistics, and information science. Abowd is a fellow and past president of the Society of Labor Economists. He is also a fellow of the American Statistical Association and the Econometric Society, as well as an elected member of the International Statistical Institute. From 2011 until 2016, he was the principal investigator for the Cornell University node of the National Science Foundation-Census Research Network (NCRN) and co-principal investigator of the NCRN coordinating office. He is the winner of the American Statistical Association's Roger Herriot Award and the Julius Shiskin Award. Abowd earned his PhD from the University of Chicago and a bachelor's degree from the department of economics at the University of Notre Dame.

Alessandro Acquisti is a professor of information technology and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University's (CMU) Heinz College and the PwC William W. Cooper Professor of Risk and Regulatory Innovation. He is the director of the Privacy Economics Experiments lab at CMU and the codirector of Carnegie Mellon's Center for Behavioral and Decision Research. Acquisti's studies have spearheaded the investigation of privacy and disclosure behavior in online social networks and the application of behavioral economics to the study of privacy and information security decision making. Among his awards are the PET Award for Outstanding Research in Privacy Enhancing Technologies, the IBM Best Academic Privacy Faculty Award, the IEEE Cybersecurity Award for Innovation, and the Heinz College School of Information's Teaching Excellence Award. His studies have appeared in journals, books, and proceedings across a variety of fields. Acquisti has testified about privacy policy and consumer behavior to the U.S. Senate and House committees and has consulted on privacy policy for government bodies including the White House's Office of Science and Technology Policy and the Council of Economic Advisers, the Federal Trade Commission, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, and the European Commission. He received his PhD from Cal Berkeley and master degrees from Cal Berkeley, the London School of Economics, and Trinity College Dublin.

David E. Altig is executive vice president and director of research at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. In addition to advising the Bank president on monetary policy and related matters, Altig oversees the Bank's regional executives and the Bank's research department and serves as a member of the Bank's management and discount committees. Altig is also an adjunct professor of economics in the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago, where he was the recipient of the 2010 Einhorn award for excellence in executive MBA teaching. In 2016, he was elected to a three-year term as a director of the National Association for Business Economics. Prior to joining the Atlanta Fed, Altig was vice president and associate director of research at the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland. He joined the Cleveland Fed in 1991 as an economist before being promoted in 1997. Before joining the Cleveland Fed, Altig was a faculty member in the department of business economics and public policy at Indiana University. Altig graduated from the University of Iowa with a bachelor's degree in business administration. He earned his master's and doctoral degrees in economics from Brown University.

David Andolfatto is a senior vice president in the research department at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. He was a professor of economics at the University of Waterloo and Simon Fraser University before joining the Fed in July 2009. Andolfatto has published several articles in journals including the American Economic Review, the Journal of Political Economy, and the Journal of Economic Theory. In 2009, he was awarded the Bank of Canada Fellowship Award for his contributions in the area of money, banking, and monetary policy. Andolfatto received his PhD in economics from the University of Western Ontario.

Raphael W. Bostic is president and chief executive officer of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. From 2012 to 2017, Bostic was the Judith and John Bedrosian Chair in Governance and the Public Enterprise at the Sol Price School of Public Policy at the University of Southern California (USC). He was director of USC's master of real estate development degree program and was the founding director of the Casden Real Estate Economics Forecast. Bostic also served USC's Lusk Center for Real Estate as the interim associate director from 2007 to 2009 and as the interim director from 2015 to 2016. From 2016 to 2017, he was the chair of the center's Governance, Management, and Policy Process Department. From 2009 to 2012, Bostic was the assistant secretary for policy development and research at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Bostic worked at the Federal Reserve Board of Governors from 1995 to 2001, first as an economist and then a senior. He served as special assistant to HUD's assistant secretary of policy development and research in 1999. He was also a professional lecturer at American University in 1998. He graduated from Harvard University in 1987 with a combined major in economics and psychology. He earned his doctorate in economics from Stanford University in 1995.

Michael Bright is president and chief executive officer of Structured Finance Industry Group (SFIG), where he leads SFIG's education, policy, and advocacy initiatives. Before joining SFIG, Bright was executive vice president and chief operating officer at Ginnie Mae. He was a director at the Milken Institute's Center for Financial Markets, where he led the institute's housing program. He was a coauthor of the DeMarco-Bright proposal on housing finance reform, which proposed to achieve housing finance reform by building on the Ginnie Mae infrastructure and processes. In 2013, Bright was a principal staff author of the government-sponsored enterprises reform bill that passed the Senate Banking Committee the following year. While in the office of U.S. Senator Bob Corker, he also advised on a range of Senate Banking Committee regulatory policy issues. Bright holds a bachelor's degree in international relations from Johns Hopkins University and a master's degree in international relations from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.

Eric Budish is professor of economics at the University of Chicago's Booth School, research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and a director of the Initiative on Global Markets at Chicago Booth. Budish's research is on market design including the design of financial exchanges, matching markets, the design of patents and R&D incentives, event ticket markets, and cryptocurrencies. Among his honors are the Marshall Scholarship, the Sloan Research Fellowship, the AQR Insight Award, and the Arrow Award. Budish's research on patent design and cancer research and development received the Kauffman/iHEA Award for health care entrepreneurship and innovation research and the Arrow Award for the best paper in health economics. He received a PhD in business economics from Harvard University, a master's degree in economics from Oxford (Nuffield College), and a bachelor's degree in economics and philosophy from Amherst College.

Sudheer Chava is Alton M. Costley chair and professor of finance at Scheller College of Business at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He also serves as the director of the interdisciplinary Master of Science in Quantitative and Computational Finance program, finance area coordinator at Scheller, associate director for risk management at the institute for information security and privacy, and director of the financial services innovation lab at Georgia Tech. Chava's research is in the area of financial intermediation, fintech, credit risk, corporate finance, and household finance. His research has appeared in journals including the Journal of Finance, the Journal of Financial Economics, the Review of Financial Studies, the Review of Finance, the Journal of Monetary Economics, the Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, and Management Science. In 2014, he received the Linda and Lloyd L. Byars Award for faculty research excellence at Georgia Tech, and he has received multiple research awards and fellowships at Texas A&M University. Chava received his MBA from the Indian Institute of Management-Bangalore and his PhD from Cornell University.

Julia Coronado is president and founder of MacroPolicy Perspectives LLC. She is also an executive in residence and blogger for Rutgers Business School. Coronado has more than a decade of experience as a financial market economist, including serving as chief economist for Graham Capital Management and BNP Paribas and as a senior economist at Barclays Capital. She also worked for the Federal Reserve Board of Governors in Washington, DC for eight years. Coronado has published articles on issues related to pension finances, social security, and retirement saving adequacy and behavior. She currently serves on the board of directors of MTGE Corporation and the Pension Research Council at the Wharton School. She is a member of the Economic Advisory Panel of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and a member of the Economic Studies Council at the Brookings Institution and until recently served on The New York Fed's Treasury Markets Practices Group. Coronado earned a PhD in economics from the University of Texas.

Andrew Davidson is a financial innovator and leader in the development of financial research and analytics. He has worked extensively on mortgage-backed securities product development, valuation, and hedging. He is founder and president of Andrew Davidson & Company, a firm specializing in the application of analytical tools to investment management. Davidson is coauthor of the book Securitization: Structuring and Investment Analysis and Mortgage-Backed Securities, Investment Analysis & Valuation Techniques. He has written numerous articles that have appeared in The Handbook of Mortgage-Backed Securities, Mortgage-Backed Securities: New Applications and Research, and the Journal of Real Estate Finance and Economics. He received an MBA in finance from the University of Chicago and a bachelor's degree in mathematics and physics from Harvard University.

Douglas J. Elliott is a partner in Oliver Wyman's financial services practice in New York. He focuses on public policy and its global implications for the financial sector. He was one of the authors of the World Economic Forum's paper on appropriate use of customer data in financial services. He was also a visiting scholar at the International Monetary Fund (IMF), assisting in developing its global policy recommendations on data issues in the financial sector. Prior to joining Oliver Wyman, he was a scholar at the Brookings Institution, where he wrote and spoke extensively on financial regulation and its international coordination. He has also been a consultant for the IMF, the World Bank, and the Asian Development Bank. Prior to Brookings, Elliott was a financial institutions investment banker for two decades, principally at J.P. Morgan. He has testified multiple times before both houses of Congress and participated in numerous speaking engagements and appeared widely in major media outlets. Elliott earned a bachelor's degree in sociology from Harvard College and a master's degree in computer science from Duke University.

Charles L. Evans has been president and chief executive officer of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago since September 2007. In that capacity, he serves on the Federal Open Market Committee, the Federal Reserve System's monetary policymaking body. Before becoming president, Evans served as director of research and senior vice president, supervising the Bank's research on monetary policy, banking, financial markets, and regional economic conditions. His personal research has focused on measuring the effects of monetary policy on U.S. economic activity, inflation, and financial market prices and has been published in peer-reviewed journals. Evans is a trustee at Rush University Medical Center, a director of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, a governing board member of Econ Illinois, a member of the Economic Club of Chicago board of directors, and a member of the civic committee of the Commercial Club of Chicago and Civic Consulting Alliance Board. Evans has taught at the University of Chicago, the University of Michigan, and the University of South Carolina. He received a bachelor's degree in economics from the University of Virginia and a doctorate in economics from Carnegie-Mellon University.

W. Scott Frame is a financial economist and senior adviser on the financial markets team in the research department of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. His major fields of study are financial institutions, credit markets, real estate, and public policy. Frame has been with the Bank since 2001, although he spent two years as the Belk Distinguished Professor of Finance at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte (2012–14). Before joining the Bank, Frame was a senior financial economist at the U.S Treasury Department from 1996 to 2000. At the Atlanta Fed, Frame was promoted to financial economist and policy adviser in 2007 and assumed his current duties in 2012. During the fall of 2008, he worked as a special adviser to the U.S. Treasury Department and assisted with the conservatorships for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. In 2009, he was a member of the team implementing the Federal Reserve's Term Asset-Backed Lending Facility. Frame's research has been published in many journals, including the Journal of Finance, the Journal of Financial Economics, the Journal of Business, the Journal of Economic Literature, and the Journal of Economic Perspectives. Frame is an associate editor of the Journal of Money, Credit, and Banking, the Journal of Financial Services Research, and the Journal of Financial Research. He is currently the executive director of the International Banking, Economics, and Finance Association (IBEFA) and on the board of directors of the American Real Estate and Urban Economics Association and the Financial Management Association. Frame received his doctorate in economics and his master's degree in economics from the University of Georgia. He received his bachelor of science in economics from Arizona State University.

Ethan Harris is the head of global economics research at BofA Merrill Lynch Global Research. He coordinates the global economics forecast and publication and manages the developed markets economics team. Before coming to BofA Merrill Lynch, Harris was the chief U.S. economist at Lehman Brothers. He also worked as an economist at Barclays and JPMorgan and spent nine years at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, where he was an assistant to the president and head of the Domestic Research Division. Harris is a founding member of the U.S. Monetary Policy Forum, and he is a member of the Chicago Fed Academic Advisory Council and the Economic Advisory Committee of the American Banker Association. He is the author of Ben Bernanke's Fed. Harris earned a bachelor's degree in economics from Clark University and a PhD in economics from Columbia University.

Keith Pritchard is an independent consultant in the investment banking technology sector. He has nearly 30 years of experience in financial services. He has held chief technology officer–level roles in major global investment banks and consultancies. Pritchard has spent most of his career in the derivatives and FX markets, and he has driven the use of innovative technologies to solve new or longstanding problems in the industry. Most recently, his focus has been on the roles that distributed ledgers might occupy in investment banking and, particularly, which of the various designs of distributed ledgers are best suited to the nature of the problems they face. He has written numerous articles on this topic, participating in and hosting panel events and workshops on distributed ledgers. Pritchard holds master's and doctorate degrees in chemistry from the University of Oxford and is currently studying part-time at the University of Cambridge for a degree in archaeology.

Tara Sinclair is an associate professor of economics and international affairs at George Washington University and a senior fellow at Indeed. As part of the Indeed Hiring Lab, Sinclair develops new economic indicators. She is also codirector of the George Washington University Research Program on Forecasting, where she evaluates real-time economic data and forecasts with a focus on their role in policy. She also builds empirical models to study economic fluctuations and trends. Sinclair earned her PhD in economics from Washington University in St. Louis.

Jim Stoker oversees financial crimes data and analytics at SunTrust Bank. Prior to this role, Stoker had been responsible for the development and management of SunTrust's analytics innovation group, operational risk management group, economic capital and stress-testing programs, comprehensive capital analysis and review process, and model risk management program. Before joining SunTrust, he was a consultant at Oliver, Wyman and Company in New York and a professor at the University of Kentucky. Stoker holds a PhD in economics from the University of Chicago and an undergraduate degree in mathematics from Wesleyan University.

Paula Tkac is a senior vice president and associate director of research at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. She leads the financial markets and micro/macro research economics teams, serves as a policy adviser, and provides strategic direction for the research division. Tkac conducts research on various financial market topics including investor decision making, the mutual fund industry, financial regulation, and the recent financial crisis and policy responses. Her research has won two William F. Sharpe Awards at the Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis. In addition to publishing in academic journals, Tkac frequently speaks to academic and practitioner groups and has appeared on C-SPAN and as an op-ed writer in the Wall Street Journal. Before she joined the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta in 2000, Tkac was on the faculty of the finance department at the University of Notre Dame. Tkac earned her bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees in economics from the University of Chicago.

Christopher Tonetti is an associate professor of economics at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research. His research is in the area of macroeconomics, with a focus on growth and household finance. His growth research focuses on how firms' investments in innovation and technology adoption contribute to aggregate growth. His recent research is on understanding the incentives and barriers that determine the diffusion of nonrival factors of production and production technologies. His household finance research focuses on the dynamics of household wealth, income, and consumption over the lifecycle. His recent work studies the reasons for the saving and labor supply behavior of the elderly and their desire for insurance against late-in-life health and longevity risks. Tonetti received a BA in economics-mathematics from Columbia University and a PhD in economics from New York University.

Martin Walker is director of banking and finance at the Center for Evidence-Based Management. He is the author of the book Front-to-Back: Designing and Changing Trade Processing Infrastructure and contributed to the book Evidence-Based Management: How to Use Evidence to Make Better Organizational Decisions. He has published several papers on blockchain and cryptocurrencies. Walker is the former senior information technology manager at RBS Markets and Dresdner Kleinwort. He has provided evidence to the UK Parliament's Treasury Committee on Digital Currencies. Walker received his master's degree in computing science from Imperial College in London and his bachelor's degree in economics from the London School of Economics.

Larry Wall is the research center executive director of the Center for Financial Innovation and Stability (CenFIS) in the research department of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. CenFIS was created to improve knowledge of financial innovation and financial stability and the connection between the two. Wall, who is part of the financial markets team, joined the financial structure team of the Bank's research department in 1982 and was promoted to executive director of CenFIS in 2013. In addition to pursuing his research agenda, he leads CenFIS's activities and conferences and provides policy advice. A certified public accountant, Wall is on the editorial boards of the Financial Review, the Journal of Financial Research, the Journal of Financial Services Research, the Journal of Financial Stability, and the Review of Financial Economics. He is also on the Academic Advisory Panel for the International Association of Deposit Insurers. He is a past president and chairman of the trustees of the Eastern Finance Association. Wall has also been an adjunct faculty member of Emory University and the Georgia Institute of Technology. Wall earned a bachelor's degree in business administration from the University of North Dakota and a PhD in business from the University of North Carolina.

Kevin Warsh is the Shepard Family Distinguished Visiting Fellow in economics at the Hoover Institution and lecturer at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. He advises several private and public companies, including service on the board of directors of UPS. Warsh conducts extensive research in the field of economics and finance. He issued an independent report to the Bank of England proposing reforms in the conduct of monetary policy in the United Kingdom. Parliament recently adopted the report's recommendations. Warsh served as a member of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System from 2006 until 2011. Warsh served as the Federal Reserve's representative to the Group of Twenty and as the Board's emissary to the emerging and advanced economies in Asia. Prior to his appointment to the Board, Warsh served as special assistant to the president for economic policy and executive secretary of the White House National Economic Council. Previously, Warsh was a member of the mergers and acquisitions department at Morgan Stanley & Co., serving as vice president and executive director. Warsh received his bachelor's degree from Stanford University and his juris doctorate from Harvard Law School.

Warren Weber was senior research officer at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, a position he held for 27 years until his retirement in 2012. Prior to that, he held teaching positions at several universities. He is a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta and is affiliated with the Institute of Decentralized Economics. His research interests are payments systems; digital currencies, particularly stablecoins; monetary theory; and U.S. banking history. He holds a PhD from Carnegie Mellon University.

David L. Yermack is the Albert Fingerhut Professor of Finance and Business Transformation at New York University (NYU) Stern School of Business. He serves as chairman of the finance department and director of the NYU Pollack Center for Law and Business. Yermack teaches courses in restructuring firms and industries, bitcoin and cryptocurrencies, corporate governance, executive compensation, and distress and restructuring. His primary research areas include boards of directors, executive compensation, and corporate finance. Yermack has published more than 25 articles in leading academic journals. He is a faculty research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research and has been a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank. Yermack received his bachelor's degree, MBA, juris doctor, MA, and PhD from Harvard University.

Mark M. Zandi is chief economist of Moody's Analytics, where he directs economic research. Zandi is a cofounder of Economy.com, which Moody's purchased in 2005. He is on the board of directors of MGIC, the nation's largest private mortgage insurance company and is the lead director of Reinvestment Fund, one of the nation's largest community development financial institutions, which makes investments in underserved communities. Zandi frequently testifies before Congress and conducts regular briefings on the economy for corporate boards, trade associations, and policymakers at all levels. He is a frequent guest on CNBC, NPR, Meet the Press, CNN, and other national networks and news programs. He is the author of Financial Shock: A 360º Look at the Subprime Mortgage Implosion, and How to Avoid the Next Financial Crisis; Paying the Price: Ending the Great Recession; and Beginning a New American Century. Zandi earned his bachelor's degree from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania.