The Vice President, Economic Impact and Public Policy Advisory holds a Ph.D. in Economics from Wayne State University, specialising in urban economics, public finance, quantitative methods, and econometrics, following graduate study at the University of Western Ontario, an M.A. in Economics from the University of Windsor, and a B.Sc. in Physics with a minor in mathematics. He has spent more than a decade in municipal economics at The City of Calgary, joining Corporate Economics as an Economist in 2011, advancing to Senior Economist, and serving as Acting City Economist, where he led a team of seven economists, regulatory analysts, and research staff, directed production of the bi-annual Calgary and Region Economic Outlook, and presented the City’s economic conditions and fiscal position to credit rating agencies including S&P Global and DBRS Morningstar.
He built the Calgary regional input–output model used to assess the economic impact of infrastructure projects across successive One Calgary service plans and budgets, and the regional macroeconometric forecasting model underpinning the bi-annual outlook. His public finance work spans vertical fiscal imbalance analysis across the three orders of government, sensitivity testing of municipal revenues against economic inputs, and analysis of public- and private-sector wage premia bearing on regional competitiveness. In land and real estate economics he has modelled residential and non-residential investment, land demand and supply, off-site levy rate imputation, and the opportunity cost of industrial land conversion, and has prepared economic impact and value-for-money analysis for the Event Centre, Rivers District revitalisation, and capital grant applications. He sits on the BILD Calgary Economic Advisory Committee and has been a member of the American Real Estate and Urban Economics Association since 2002.