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10- Housing and Construction
Presentations
Ken Simonson PPI | Ken Simonson PPI 2
Speakers
Duncan Meldrum
Chief Economist
Air Products
Duncan Meldrum is the Chief Economist for Air Products and Chemicals, Inc., Air Products and Chemicals, Inc., an $8.1 billion industrial gas company serving customers in over 30 countries. As Chief Economist, he assesses the impact of the economic environment on the company’s performance for the executive management team and develops global economic assumptions for the company’s operating plans. He provides operating groups with pricing assistance, contract support and market analyses. He also serves as the company’s economics spokesperson.
He received a B.S. degree from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1973, a M.S. degree in Operations Research from the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School in 1974, and a Ph.D. in Economics from Lehigh University in 1992. He is a member of the Advisory Committee to the U.S. Census Bureau. He serves as a director on the boards of the APCI Federal Credit Union and the nonprofit Parkette National Gymnastics Center. He is a past president of the National Association for Business Economics. His other professional associations include the Conference of Business Economists, the National Business Economic Issues Council, and the American Economics Association.
Arthur Cresce
U.S. Census Bureau
Dr. Arthur Cresce has had a lifelong devotion to providing high-quality information to the data-user public. He began his professional career at the Census Bureau in 1973 where he worked on the development of data for the Hispanic population. At the time, this was one of the top priorities of the Census Bureau, especially given keen Congressional interest in the topic. For 26 years he played an important role in the development, testing, and evaluation of questions used in current surveys and in three decennial censuses. He gained particularly strong expertise in devising strategies for editing data and imputing for missing values. From 1992 to 1998, Dr. Cresce worked in the Decennial Management Division, participating in the planning for Census 2000. During this time, he served as project manager for the Continuous Measurement Survey, which has now developed into the American Community Survey. He also served as project manager for a key study to create a pay rate system that would ensure employment of sufficient human resources to complete critical field work under tight time constraints. He received a promotion to Assistant Division Chief for Housing Characteristics in the Housing and Household Economics Statistics Division in April 2005.
His formal education includes a batchelor’s degree in international affairs from the George Washington University with a strong background in economics. He received a master’s degree in demography from Georgetown University, where he wrote his master’s thesis on migration as a response to differential economic development among regions of the United States. Finally, he received a Ph.D. in policy sciences from the University of Maryland at Baltimore, which allowed him to combine the disciplines of demography and economics in assessing the impact of public policy on the population. Of note, his dissertation dealt with the impact of receipt of unemployment insurance on mobility of the unemployed.
Dr. Cresce looks forward to meeting and working with users of housing data to understand their data needs and provide the data that will meet those needs.
Kenneth D. 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.
Richard L. Wobbekind
University of Colorado at Boulder
Richard L. Wobbekind is Associate Dean for MBA and Enterprise Programs, Associate Professor of Business Economics and Finance, and Executive Director of the Business Research Division at the Leeds School of Business at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
As Executive Director of the Business Research Division his responsibilities include developing an annual consensus forecast of the Colorado economy and performing various strategic analyses and economic impact assessments of the Colorado economy. His most recent work includes an affordable housing study. Rich also produces a quarterly economic indicator series for Boulder County and a quarterly Business Leader Confidence Index for the Colorado.
He participates annually in the Kansas City Federal Reserve Bank Regional Economic Roundtable, and is a contributor to the Western Blue Chip forecast newsletter and the National Association of Business Economists Economic Policy Survey. Professor Wobbekind was appointed to the board of the National Association for Business Economists in 2006. Rich is a member of the Governor’s Revenue Estimating Advisory Committee, the Denver Regional Council of Government’s Forecast 2030 Advisory Committee, the Colorado Tourism Office Education and Research Advisory Committee, the Boulder Economic Council, the Boulder Redevelopment Authority and the Center for the American West.
For his efforts in community development and outreach, Rich was awarded the University of Colorado Community Outreach Award in 1997. In 2002 he was named a Member of Distinction by the Boulder Chamber of Commerce. In 2006 he received the Robert L. Stearns award for lifetime excellence in research, teaching and service to the University of Colorado.
Dr. Wobbekind teaches MBA, undergraduate and executive students in macroeconomics, public policy and entrepreeneurship. He has received four awards for teaching excellence from the students of the Leeds School. Dr. Wobbekind received a BA in Economics from Bucknell University and an MA and Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Colorado at Boulder.
