University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Jeffrey Brown is the Josef and Margot Lakonishok Endowed Professor in Business and the tenth Dean of the College of Business at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He also serves as a professor of finance and was the founding director of the Center for Business and Public Policy. He is the Director of the Retirement Research Center at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) in Cambridge, MA.  He is a Trustee and chair of the Audit Committee for TIAA, where he also serves on the Risk and Compliance Committee and the Investment Committee. He also serves as a member of the Governing Board of the Center for Audit Quality (CAQ) and as Vice Chair of the Board of Managers of UI Singapore Research LLC. 

Brown has published extensively on public and private insurance markets, including articles in The American Economic Review, The Journal of Political Economy, The Journal of Finance, The Journal of Financial Economics, and numerous other journals and books.  He is the recipient of the Lumina Award for Outstanding Research in Insurance and E-Commerce, the Paul A. Samuelson Award for Outstanding Scholarly Writing on Lifelong Financial Security, the ARIA Early Career Scholarly Achievement Award, and the RIIA Achievement in Applied Retirement Research Award. He was also named a University Scholar by the University of Illinois in 2011. Brown has edited four books, the most recent of which explores how the Great Recession affected higher education. He is a co-founder and former co-editor of the Journal of Pension Economics and Finance and an associate editor of the Journal of Risk and Insurance. He has served as a consultant to numerous federal government agencies as well as many of the leading U.S. financial services firms. Prior to graduate school, he was a Brand Manager at the Procter & Gamble Company

Robert Resek served as University Vice President for Academic Affairs from 1988 to 1995 where he was chief budget officer, and senior academic officer for the University. Resek focused his research as a professor on technical progress, investment behavior, the demand for money, risk analysis and regional economics. This research was funded by the National Science Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the US State Department, the Illinois Chamber of Commerce and the Illinois Board of Higher Education. In 1977 he became director of the Bureau of Economic and Business Research of the University where he published a quarterly Illinois Economic Review, an annual economic outlook and a statistical abstract of Illinois. As an advisor to Governor Jim Thompson, he organized a conference and book, The Midwest Economy: Issues and Policy. During his tenure, the bureau significantly expanded its role in analyzing the state economy including the development of significant forecasting capability for the state economy and state revenue.   He was active in the Association of University Business and Economic Research where he served as director, vice president, and president.

Julian Reif’s primary area of interest is health care economics, with a current research focus on the value of health and the effectiveness of social insurance programs. One of his recent papers argues that the societal value of medical technology is significantly larger than has previously been recognized, especially with respect to medical treatments for severe diseases. The paper also shows that medical treatments act as a form of insurance. Consequently, medical innovation policy can have a large impact on reducing health risks. Another recent paper finds that Medicare Part D, a prescription drug program for the elderly established by the Medicare Modernization Act of 2003, successfully reduced mortality following its implementation. He also studies energy and environmental policy, such as the gasoline tax, air pollution, and carbon emissions. His recent work in that area includes estimating the effect of air pollution on mortality, medical utilization, and healthcare costs. He finds that the reduction in air pollution over the past twenty years reduced elderly mortality, generating significant social benefits.

Elizabeth T. Powers has conducted research on the incentive effects of public insurance programs, the effects of child health on maternal labor supply, employment effects of the minimum wage, and the caregiver labor market. Ongoing research projects are in the areas of children’s cognitive development, U.S.-Mexican migration, child support policy, work disability and the Disability Insurance program, and long-term care facilities. Powers is the author of numerous peer-reviewed journal articles and received fellowships and awards for her scholarship from the University of Pennsylvania, Vassar College, the Brookings Institution, and the University of Illinois. She has been a principal investigator on numerous grants.

James Kuklinski’s primary interests include the nature and quality of citizen decision-making, the relationship between public opinion and legislative policymaking, and the use of experiments in social scientific research.

Geoffrey J.D. Hewings' major research efforts are directed toward modeling of urban, regional and interregional economic systems. Much of this work is based on a set of econometric-input-output models that have been developed for several metropolitan areas and states in the United States as well as several regions in Brazil, Colombia, Indonesia and Japan. Hewings heads the Regional Economics Applications Laboratory (REAL).

George Gross' major research activities are in power system analysis, economics, and control and electric utility regulatory policy. He has a keen interest in the interdisciplinary aspects of these areas. Gross has numerous publications in international refereed journals and has lectured at many universities around the world. Gross has introduced new courses into the curriculum and has organized national annual conferences on regulatory issues. He participated in the establishment and direction of the annual Edison Electric Institute School for Power System Operations and Planning, and has actively participated in industry restructuring forums, including appearances before FERC, NARUC and state regulatory agencies.