UF finance professor named chief economist for Securities and Exchange Commission

July 22, 2014

Flannery will take leave from his scholarly commitments at Warrington to fulfill his duties at the SEC starting Sept. 8.

“Working as chief economist at the SEC offers a very exciting opportunity,” Flannery said. “I look forward to learning about new policy issues and to bringing that expertise back to students and colleagues here in Gainesville.” 

DERA was created in 2009 to integrate financial economics and rigorous data analytics into the core mission of the SEC. DERA is involved across the entire range of SEC activities, including policy-making, rule-making, enforcement and examination. According to its official release, DERA’s recent activities include “providing economic analysis for the commission’s cross-border security-based swap rules and guidance, writing white papers on topics such as over-the-counter trading and the interconnectedness in the credit default swaps market that help the commission better understand activity in these markets, and providing analysis on enforcement actions involving market manipulation, insider trading and accounting fraud.”

Flannery has held multiple government advisory roles, serving on the Federal Reserve’s Model Validation Council, as a senior advisor to the Department of Treasury’s Office of Financial Research, as resident scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and as an advisory committee member on the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta’s Center for Financial Innovation and Financial Stability, among other appointments.

“Professor Flannery is a widely respected economist with extensive experience in many areas relevant to the SEC’s mission, including the regulation of financial institutions, corporate finance, private funds and credit ratings agencies,” SEC Chair Mary Jo White said in a news release.. “His decades of research experience in the field of financial economics, as well as his work with other financial regulators, will be valuable assets as he leads the Commission’s strong team of economists.”

At UF, Flannery teaches corporate finance and financial management of financial institutions at the graduate level, and his research has explored government regulation of the financial sector. He received a bachelor’s degree from Princeton University in 1972 and earned a master’s in economics (1973), a Master of Philosophy in Economics (1974) and a doctorate in economics (1978) all from Yale University.