Podcast Center
Video Center
Webcasts
Resource Center
Events
July 21, 2014 at 09:42 AM
The Securities and Exchange Commission announced Monday that Mark J. Flannery will be the agency’s new chief economist and director of its Division of Economic and Risk Analysis.
Flannery, who is currently a finance professor at the University of Florida’s Warrington School of Business Administration, will begin his new post in September.
DERA, created in 2009 to act as the SEC’s economic think tank, provides interdisciplinary analysis to help inform the Commission’s policymaking, rulemaking, enforcement and examinations.
“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,” said SEC Chairwoman Mary Jo White, in a statement. “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.”
Flannery replaces Craig M. Lewis, who returned to his post as a professor of finance at Vanderbilt University’s Owen Graduate School of Management. Since Lewis left in May, deputy directors Scott Bauguess and Jennifer Marietta-Westberg have acted as co-directors of the division.
The SEC notes that DERA staffers have expertise in disciplines including economics, risk analysis, finance, law, mathematics and statistics, and that due to an increase in the number of complex matters before DERA, its staff has grown to nearly 100, up from 60 in 2011, with further expansion planned for 2014.
Some of 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.
