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About CFPR
Created in 2008, the Center for Public Finance Research (CPFR) offers research and education in public budgeting and finance, public financial management, public economics, and benefit-cost analysis at the local, regional, national, and international levels. To accomplish its work CPFR engages faculty from the School of Public Affairs and across American University, as well as scholars from the Washington, DC, policy community.
CFPR is well positioned for its mission. Washington, D.C., the seat of the federal government, is also home to embassies and the headquarters of major international financial organizations (e.g. the World Bank, the IMF, and the Inter-American Development Bank). Through its research and consulting services, CFPR takes advantage of its location to provide unique opportunities for American University students to observe how the public policy process works and to become actively involved in the development and formation of both local and national fiscal policy. CPFR also offers faculty the opportunity to engage in internationally oriented applied research and technical assistance.
CPFR provides scholars from the policy community with a forum for exchange of ideas in an academic setting and allows the establishment of teams of academic researchers across the nation to:
(1) perform and disseminate the findings of sponsored research,
(2) provide international technical assistance, and
(3) deliver workshops and training programs.
CFPR Mission
The mission of CFPR is to facilitate and conduct funded research in public budgeting and financing of public programs and services. To this end, CFPR develops proposals to inform the policy debate and contribute to effective financial management systems performance.
CFPR activities include: (1) research of tax policy/administration and public expenditure management, budgeting and financial management issues in the US and overseas (e.g. fiscal decentralization, capital financing), (2) organization and hosting of international student/ practitioner exchanges between American and overseas universities that provide public finance degrees and work with governmental fiinance units/ NGOs (e.g. political economy program at Fribourg University, Switzerland), and (3) provision of technical assistance and training to governments and NGOs in public budgeting and financial management topics.
In order to achieve its multiple programmatic objectives, CFPR pursues funding from various foundations and also presents sponsored forums and conferences on important fiscal policy issues.
Core Faculty and Staff
Dr. Daniel Mullins
Associate Professor, Department of Public Administration and Policy
Exeuctive Director, Center for Public Finance Research
Professor Mullin’s research has focused on fiscal reform and decentralization, intergovernmental fiscal systems, the effects of tax and expenditure limitations on state and local fiscal structure, the implications of demographic changes for state and local revenues and expenditures, municipal budgeting practices, economic development strategies, and the spatial and economic structure of metropolitan areas. His research has appeared in a variety of academic and professional publications, including Public Administration Review, Policy Sciences, Urban Affairs Quarterly, Public Budgeting & Finance, and publications of the Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations (ACIR), the World Bank, and the International City Management Association (ICMA). In addition to his teaching and academic research experience, Dr. Mullins has served extensively in consulting and advisory capacities on issues of public sector budgeting and intergovernmental fiscal relations both domestically and abroad. He is also managing editor of the journal Public Budgeting and Finance.
Dr. René W. Aubourg
Assistant Professor, Department of Public Administration and Policy
Director of International Programs, Center for Public Finance Research
Dr. Aubourg is a quantitative policy analyst with more than ten years of experience in economic growth and poverty reduction, macroeconomic policy management, economic impact analysis, and project management. He has substantial managerial experience in central banking having headed, from 1995 to 2000, the Economic Studies Department and the Training Institute of Haiti’s Central Bank. He also has extensive experience appraising large scale development projects. As an economic consultant in 2004, he directed the feasibility study for the €100 million Pointe Simon waterfront project in Fort-de-France, Martinique, a public-private partnership between Trinidadian and French developers and the Municipality of Fort-de-France.
Dr. Aubourg has done consulting work for the European Union and the World Bank in Haiti, and more recently for the IMF Institute in Tunisia. He has also worked as an international consultant to local governments and financial institutions in St. Kitts and Nevis, Jamaica, and Trinidad and Tobago where he was a lecturer at the University of the West Indies. Since December 2006, he has been training on a regular basis senior government officials and executives from Sub-Saharan Africa on best practices in poverty reduction, project management, and pro-poor growth policies at Hetta International Development Center in New York City. Dr. Aubourg is Professeur Invité at the Agence Universitaire de la Francophonie (AUF), the global multilateral cooperation agency for French-speaking universities and research institutions in the world, and Faculty Affiliate at the Institute for Family and Social Responsibility at Indiana University. Dr. Aubourg is a native speaker of French and Creole. He is fluent in English and has a good command of the Spanish Language.
Dr. George M. Guess
Scholar in Residence, Department of Public Administration and Policy
Dr. Guess is also Co-Director of the Center for Democracy and Election Management. From 2004-2007, he was Director of Research at the Open Society Institute's Local Government and Public Services Reform Initiative in Budapest, Hungary. In 2005-2006, he was also Acting Director of the Master's of Public Policy Program at CentralEuropeanUniversity. From 1993-2004, Dr. Guess was a senior public administration specialist at Development Alternatives, Inc. (DAI). He has worked for more than 20 years providing technical assistance and training to strengthen and reform central and local government systems. Dr. Guess served two years with the Fiscal Affairs Department of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), providing assistance on budget execution and control in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. For the World Bank, he led and served on public expenditure review missions in the former Soviet Union, Africa and Central America. In 2003-2004, he was Team Leader of the Budget/Finance Team for the USAID-funded DAI local government strengthening project in Romania. During his career, he also designed and delivered public expenditure training courses for the IMF, World Bank and Joint Vienna Institutes. Dr. Guess was a tenured professor of public administration at GeorgiaStateUniversity in Atlanta. He was an OAS Fellow to Costa Rica and a Fulbright Professor twice—once to Uruguay and later in the Central American Research Program to Honduras, Belize and Costa Rica. His Ph.D is in Political Science from the University of California, Riverside, and he is the author or co-author of six books, including: Managing and Financing Urban Public Transport Systems (Budapest: Local Government and Public Service Reform Initiative of the Open Society Institute, 2008). Dr. Guess is fluent in Spanish and has a working knowledge of German.
Dr. Robert Carroll
Executive-in-Residence, Department of Public Administration and Policy
Dr. Carroll is a nationally recognized tax policy expert who recently served as the U.S. Treasury Department’s Deputy Assistant Secretary for Tax Analysis, the Department’s top tax economist. In that role he oversaw and directed the Treasury Department’s efforts on reform of the tax system including providing analytical and other support to the President’s Advisory Panel on Federal Tax Reform. He has also served as a senior economist at the President’s Council of Economic Advisers and a visiting scholar at the Congressional Budget Office. He has published numerous papers on a wide range of tax issues in the Journal of Labor Economics, National Tax Journal, The Review of Economics and Statistics, Public Finance Review, andTax Policy and the Economy.He has testified before Congress on a wide range of tax issues including tax reform, the alternative minimum tax, health care, the solvency of the highway trust funds, and expiring tax provisions. Dr. Carroll is Vice President for Economic Policy at the Tax Foundation. He holds a Ph.D. and M.A. in economics from Syracuse University.
Mr. Marvin Ward Jr.
Assistant to the Executive Director
Mr. Ward is also a Ph.D. student in the School of Public Affairs at American University. He is a recent addition to the Center, and has responsibilities in the areas of research, proposal development, project coordination, and logistical support. Prior to joining CPFR, Mr. Ward worked for the EOP Group, Inc., an Executive Branch lobbying/consulting firm. During his time there, his work centered on energy and climate policy, with a particular focus on new generation asset development. Mr. Ward’s role was to assess the implications of energy/climate regulation and policy, for the purposes of determining the financial impact on new energy projects. Over the course of his association with American University, Mr. Ward has performed research in the realms of public finance and infrastructure policy. Further, he has presented some of this work at the National Tax Association annual conference. He holds Bachelors' Degrees in both Mechanical Engineering and Engineering & Public Policy from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.
Areas of Focus
Domestic:
Health policy,
Infrastructure policy
Energy policy,
Urban public transportation policy,
Entitlement reform and tax policy.
International:
Cost-benefit analysis of international development projects
Public sector reforms
Fiscal and Political Decentralization
Public expenditure reviews
Capital planning, budgeting and financing
Macroeconomic and fiscal policy management
Programs
CPFR signed an agreement in 2008 with Development Alternatives, Inc (DAI) to provide specialized training and technical assistance work in public finance and democratic/economic governance. This work will be provided on a competitive win basis under the Support for Economic Growth and Institutional Reform (SEGIR III) contract with USAID.
Pursuant to a contract with the Central Bank of Haiti (BRH), CPFR staff will begin in April, 2009 an intense one-year program of technical assistance and training in public finance and policy analysis for 20 participants selected by the Government of Haiti. Courses will be delivered in Port-au-Prince on such topics as: tax policy/administration, microeconomic analysis, financing government services, budget process, and infrastructure planning and financing.
Call for Papers in CPFR's Working Paper Series
The purpose of the Working Paper Series (WPS) is to encourage, support and disseminate research on public finance issues by the AU community. The WPS is published online periodically by the CPFR and disseminated to the university environment and others in the public finance community. The WPS is interested in publishing research on such national and international issues as: the costs of public programs and services; tax policies and administration issues; fees and pricing practices for public services and facilities; budgeting and expenditure control; purchasing and contracting; accounting and auditing of public funds; public expenditure performance; comparative and international budgetary practices and results; cash and debt management; intergovernmental and local government fiscal management; infrastructure and capital budgeting and financing; and the organization and management of finance departments.
Published papers can be downloaded from this site. Please note that WPS papers will be updated periodically by their authors to take advantage of new data and additions to the public finance literature.
WPS Publications Policy
Submissions will be examined by one reviewer selected by the editorial office. Manuscripts (preferably in Word) should be no more than 40pp double-spaced including charts, tables and references.
Daniel Mullins, Center for Public Finance Research
Marvin Ward, Center for Public Finance Research
Affiliated Specialists
For its international and US-based contract assignments, CPFR relies on a team of affiliated public finance specialists. These are practitioners in particular areas of public finance that have extensive experience in technical assistance, capacity-building and education.
Mr. Jacques Cook
Mr.Cook is an institutional, legal and project finance specialist who focuses on drafting, analyzing and negotiating contracts used in Private Public Partnerships. He has been a partner at Peckar & Abramson, P.C. and head of their PPP Group focusing on energy, transportation, and environmental infrastructure projects. He was formerly Chief Counsel at the Inter-American Development Bank in Washington, D.C. where he supervised and drafted most of the key contractual documents deployed by the IDB in its private sector project finance transactions. Mr. Cook previously served as counsel with the prestigious UK law firm, Allen & Overy LLP in its New York office where he works on major infrastructure project transactions in Chile, Brazil and Mexico.
Mr. Cook has also been an Adjunct Professor at Georgetown University and George Mason University teaching international investment and project finance respectively in the School of Foreign Service and the School of Public Policy. He teaches regularly in PPP-related courses for the Institute for Public-Private Partnership, Inc. (IP3), training hundreds of officials from over 75 countries worldwide. He has served as the key instructor in IP3 “PPP and Project Finance” courses in Barbados, Kenya, Tanzania, Ukraine and South Africa. Mr. Cook is also a consultant conducting training program for the Consejo Nacional de Concesiones in Costa Rica assisting its PPP program. Mr. Cook received his J.D. from George Washington University. He is fluent in Spanish and French and has a working knowledge of Portuguese.
Mr. John. C. Dalton
Mr. Dalton has more than 20 years of experience at the Chief of Party and Team Leader level in managing and executing overseas projects in most regions of the world, particularly Africa and Asia. For example, he worked on projects in Pakistan (fiscal decentralization), Zambia (anti-corruption), Burundi (local government financial management), Haiti (educational strengthening), Congo (customs reform), Liberia (performance management), Egypt (strengthening the water agency), and legislative strengthening (Gaza). He also served as Director of the Office of Local Government for the State of Massachusetts.
Dr. Charles Jokay
Dr. Karoly (Charles) Jokay is a municipal finance and creditworthiness specialist with extensive experience in Central and Eastern European countries, including Serbia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Hungary, Macedonia and Romania, and recently (2009), India, South Africa, Namibia and Botswana. Having served for two years as the Municipal Capital Markets Development Advisor to the Ministry of Interior and to the Ministry of Finance in Hungary, he has extensive regional experience in policy reform, municipal finance and budgeting, utility infrastructure, and the regulation and management of municipal debt. He provides municipal finance and development consulting to international donors and to Hungarian municipalities. Dr. Jokay is currently active in India on a World Bank project evaluating the municipal borrowing regulatory framework in 4 states as well as at the Union level. In Africa, (2009) he is developing a water tariff calculation model, as well as budgeting templates on behalf of local government associations in South Africa, Namibia, and Botswana. The project is sponsored by the EU and the Swedish International Development Agency. Jokay recently completed two World Bank projects in Serbia, providing support on municipal bond disclosure standards, as well as advise on public utility transformation and regulation in the municipal services sector. Jokay, as a Visiting Professor in the Public Policy Department at Central European University in Budapest, teaches courses in municipal finance and public budgeting. He is fluent in Hungarian (native) and English.
Dr. Arthur J. Mann
Dr. Mann has more than 30 years of experience carrying out short‑ and long‑term international consulting assignments with private sector consulting firms and such organizations as the U.S. Agency for International Development, the World Bank, the Inter‑American Development Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the International Labour Office, the United Nations Development Program, and the Organization of American States. His participation in over 80 consulting studies/missions has taken him to numerous Latin American and Caribbean countries, Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East. Most of Dr. Mann’s work has been in the areas of tax policy and tax administration, tax reform, and public expenditure analysis. He is especially interested in the tax policy-tax administration nexus. He has participated in tax reform efforts in Bahrain, Bolivia, Guatemala, Mongolia, Nicaragua, Panama, Poland, Puerto Rico, Tanzania, and The Bahamas. Moreover, he established and monitored tax administration conditionality for a World Bank structural adjustment loan to Guatemala. In addition to his short-term consultancies, he spent several years in Argentina as a labor market/human resources economist on an ILO employment/labor market project, and in the late 1980s he directed a USAID-funded Harvard Institute for International Development economic policy reform project in Bolivia. During his tenure as a university economics professor, he published more than 70 articles in internationally recognized professional journals, most dealing with varied aspects of public finance and public sector reform. Dr. Mann has a Ph.D. in economics, and is fluent in Spanish.
Dr. Eric R. Nelson
Dr. Eric R. Nelson offers over 40 years of experience in economic development in both short and long-term capacity with World Bank, DAI, ADB and HIID. Throughout his career Dr. Nelson has provided technical assistance in the areas of economic policy, fiscal reform, financial services, and institutional reform. For example, he recently assessed the impact of the Asian Development Bank’s program loans on poverty and was the principal investigator for a methodological and field study of financial services and policies throughout Africa. He assisted in the design of one of the first impact evaluations ever done of a major credit program, in Indonesia. Thereafter, he served as chief of party for a multi-country study on rural finance institutions and economic policy reform. During his tenure at the World Bank, he served as the country economist for Burundi, Democratic Republic of Congo, and Liberia. In this capacity Dr. Nelson helped design strategies associated with international controls over government expenditures in post-conflict economy, economic recovery credits, arrears clearance and sectoral reforms. In 2006, 2007 and 2008, teams led by Dr. Nelson received the World Bank’s Africa Region Award for Excellence for economic reforms in Liberia. Dr. Nelson has been Principal Associate for Nathan Associates Inc., Senior Economist for Development Alternatives Inc. and Project Associate at the Harvard Institute of International Development. Additionally, Dr. Nelson has taught courses in economics at Amherst College and Smith College. He holds a PhD in economics from Yale University. He is fluent in French and has substantial working experience in Spanish and Indonesian.
Mr. Peter Simon
Mr. Simon Is a senior intergovernmental/budget expert with 14 years of experience in nine countries; substantial experience with USAID, EU and the World Bank; extensive technical expertise in: intergovernmental finances, public sector budgeting, strategic planning, capital programming, citizen participation and good governance. His managerial experience consists of: Team Leader, Deputy Chief of Party and Chief of Party. His functional expertise includes: intergovernmental capital transfer design in Iraq; revenue assignment policies in Kyrgyzstan; COP of the USAID local government project in Ukraine; and Deputy COP and technical assistance on budget discipline strategies for the local government project in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Prior to his international work, he was actively involved in conducting background studies on Budapest urban transport, and on city's debt carrying capacity for two $75 million infrastructure loans. He is Fluent in both Hungarian (native) and Russian.
Dr. Manana Gnolidze-Swanson
From 1995 – 2006, Dr. Swanson was a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Oriental Studies (Near and Middle East Department) within the Academy of Sciences of Georgia. There she worked on the issues of the energy and tax and fiscal policy in the Middle East, Georgia and the former Soviet region. From 1998-2003 she worked as a Senior Business Consultant for a World Bank enterprises restructuring project, assisting newly privatized companies to restructure. She analyzed the effects of alternative fiscal policies (budget and taxation) on enterprise performance. In South Georgia, Dr. Swanson worked as a specialist for a DFID-funded project to strengthen local government development in that region. She has also performed feasibility studies for local community sustainability for USAID and her recommendations were later successfully implemented. Dr. Swanson has an MPA from George Mason University with a concentration in public finance and a Ph.D from Tbilisi State University. She participated in graduate studies at Mumbai University in India and received a State Department-sponsored fellowship to conduct research at the UC Berkeley and at the Woodrow Wilson Center (Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies) in Washington, D.C. She is fluent in Russian and Georgian.
Mr. Costel Todor
Costel Todor is Deputy Vice-president for Mergers and Acquisitions of SIVECO Romania, the largest software firm in Romania. He has a BS (1994) in Electrical Engineering from The “Transylvania” University, Romania and an M.Sc. (2006) from The Academy for Economic Studies, Bucharest, Romania. For two years (2004-2005), he was lead specialist on the USAID/DAI project for installation of capital planning and budgeting systems in 15 cities. Following completion of that work, he was put in charge of infrastructure planning and contracting for the Secretary General in the Romanian Ministry of Justice. With more than eleven years of experience, he has designed and delivered technical assistance and training for central and local government reform projects in: project management, public services, local infrastructure and local economic development, education, social assistance, and the information technology sector. He was a member of Board of Directors of Deposit Guarantee Fund in the Banking System of Romania (2006-2007) and a Member of Board of Directors for Superior Council of Accountancy and Financials Reports (2005-2007). He is fluent in Romanian (native) and English.
Mr. Glendal Wright
Based in Kiev, Mr. Wright has over fifteen years of experience in the transition countries as a project manager, consultant, trainer, and professor in developing and delivering programs in public administration, budget and finance and local government services. He has extensive experience in management of technical and training programmes as Chief of Party, Chief Technical Advisor, and Team Leader.
His assignments in Poland, Hungary, Ukraine, Bulgaria, Kyrgyzstan, Romania, Kosovo, Macedonia, Tajikistan, Iraq, Angola, Afghanistan and Philippines required provision of training and technical assistance to local governments, training organizations, and public administration institutions. He has provided training and technical assistance to local governments in the functional areas of: public administration, budget and finance, and local government services. He has written extensively in these subjects and is author of a textbook on public administration that has been translated into Ukrainian and Russian. He is the co-editor of a public finance textbook that has been translated into Czech-Slovak, Ukrainian, Russian, Serbian, and Hungarian. He also co-authored a textbook on public management in Central and Eastern Europe. He has extensive experience in the development of training organizations and public administration institutions for curriculum and teacher development.
Mr. Wright has extensive experience in public financial management and the development of intergovernmental transfer systems in transition countries, including Kosovo, Tajikistan, Slovak Republic, Bosnia and Hercegovina, Kyrgyzstan and Afghanistan. In these positions he provided technical support to Ministries of Finance and other ministries dealing with public finance issues and budgeting processes, including Medium Term Expenditure Frameworks (MTEFs) and program budgeting.
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