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Session 2 Housing Policy Solutions
Presentations
Speakers
Ken Simonson
Associated General Contractors of America
Ken Simonson joined AGC of America on September 10, 2001. Ever since Day Two he has been provided insight into what was happening to the economy and what it implied for construction and related industries.
Ken’s weekly one-page email newsletter for AGC, The Data DIGest, provides 6000 readers with the latest economic news relevant to construction. He also sends out a variety of state-specific and tax news. He is interviewed and quoted almost daily by local and national media, including The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Business Week, and CNBC. In addition, he has written eight booklets explaining tax provisions in plain English, and he contributes frequently to a variety of business and professional publications and conferences, including columns for Fleet Owner, a trucking magazine, and The Electrical Distributor.
Ken has 30 years of experience analyzing, advocating and communicating about economic and tax issues. Before joining AGC, he was senior economic advisor in the U.S. Small Business Administration’s Office of Advocacy and 13 years. Earlier, he was vice president and chief economist for the American Trucking Associations. He also worked with the President’s Commission on Industrial Competitiveness, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Federal Home Loan Bank Board, and an economic consulting firm.
Ken is a board member of the National Association for Business Economics (NABE) and author of “Digging into Construction Data,” published in NABE’s journal, Business Economics. Since 1982, he has co-chaired the Tax Economists Forum, a professional meeting group he co-founded for leading researchers and policy makers among tax economists. He is vice president of Community Tax Aid, an organization that prepares returns for free for low-income taxpayers. He was one of the principal subjects of The Lobbyists, a bestseller by Jeffrey Birnbaum, now a writer for the Washington Post.
Ken has a BA in economics from the University of Chicago, an MA in economics from Northwestern University, and he has taken advanced graduate economics courses at the Universite de Paris, Johns Hopkins University and Georgetown University.
David Crowe
National Association of Home Builders
David Crowe, Ph.D., is Chief Economist and Senior Vice President at the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB). Dr. Crowe is responsible for NAHB’s forecast of housing and economic trends, survey research and analysis of the home building industry and consumer preferences as well as microeconomic analysis of government policies that affect housing.
Dr. Crowe is also responsible for the development and implementation of an innovative model of the local economic impact and fiscal cost of new home construction, which has estimated the net impact of new housing in over 500 local markets. Past research has concentrated on home ownership trends, tax issues, demographics, government mortgage insurance, local land use ordinance impacts and the impacts of housing on local economies.
Before becoming NAHB’s Chief Economist, Dr. Crowe was NAHB’s Senior Vice President for Regulatory and Housing Policy. Prior to NAHB, Dr. Crowe was Deputy Director of the Division of Housing and Demographic Analysis at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.
He has served on federal advisory committees to the Census Bureau and to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. Dr. Crowe holds a PhD in Economics from the University of Kentucky.
LaVaughn M. Henry
PMI Group, Inc
Dr. LaVaughn M. Henry is the Director of U.S. Economic Analysis for The PMI Group, Inc., in the Economics & Corporate Strategy Department. PMI is a leader in the private mortgage insurance industry.
Dr. Henry is responsible for developing PMI’s econometric modeling efforts and projections of home prices (at the national, state, and metropolitan levels) and PMI’s U.S. Market Risk Index. In addition, he is in charge of producing regular analyses of the U.S. economy and housing and mortgage markets. He is an accomplished public speaker and regularly presents to various industry, government, and other professional organizations. Dr. Henry helped to develop and co-authors the company’s two regular economic publications: Economic and Real Estate Trends (ERET) and The Housing & Mortgage Market Review (HaMMR), and has led in the development of many of the company’s econometric models and various other predictive tools used in the assessment of risk in the housing and mortgage markets.
Prior to working at PMI, Dr. Henry was the Director of Midwest Regional Communications at Fannie Mae, in its Housing and Community Development Group. He has also held senior economic positions in the Budget Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives, the Federal Housing Finance Agency (formerly the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight), the FDIC’s Resolution Trust Corporation, PricewaterhouseCoopers, and Ford Motor Company.
Dr. Henry received both his Doctorate and Masters degrees from Harvard University in Economics, specializing in the areas of Finance and Industrial Organization.