Michael
J. Walsh is a Senior Vice President of Environmental Financial Products L.L.C.,
which specializes in providing customized risk management and trading services
and developing new financial, commodity, and environmental markets.
Environmental Financial also designs risk management and hybrid financial
instruments that enhance the interrelationships between the capital, insurance,
commodity, and environmental markets.
Dr.
Walsh previously served as a Senior Economist with the Chicago Board of Trade
where he directed the Chicago Board of Trade’s efforts to develop
exchange-based environmental markets. Walsh
designed and managed annual auctions of sulfur dioxide emission allowances
conducted as part of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency acid rain
reduction program. Dr. Walsh has
delivered Congressional testimony and provided dozens of presentations to state
public utility commissions, national regulatory conferences and industry
seminars. As the lead CBOT energy
market analyst, he covered electricity market deregulation and evaluated the
feasibility of electricity futures contracts.
Dr. Walsh also directed, in conjunction with a team of industry and
public sector leaders, establishment of the CBOT Recyclable Materials Exchange,
an electronic marketplace backed by product standards, grading procedures and
dispute resolution services. Dr.
Walsh represented the CBOT in matters involving several U.S. government agencies
including the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the Internal Revenue Service
and the Environmental Protection Agency.
Prior
to his position with the Chicago Board of Trade, Dr. Walsh was a Financial
Economist in the Office of Tax Policy in the U.S. Department of the Treasury.
In that position he conducted industry studies of economic depreciation
rates and co-authored a comprehensive review of the history of tax depreciation
policy. Dr. Walsh has also served
as a consultant to the Michigan Treasury Department and the West Virginia Tax
Study Commission.
As a consultant to the U.S.
Agency for International Development, Dr. Walsh has provided instructional
seminars on emissions trading for industry and government officials from several
eastern European countries. He has been a speaker at United Nations climate
conferences at Geneva, Kyoto, Buenos Aires, Bonn and The Hague, and has been a
keynote speaker at industry conferences and educational workshops around the
world, including events in Budapest, Moscow and Sydney.
Dr.
Walsh served as a gubernatorial appointee to the Florida Air Emissions Trading
Commission, and served on the Executive Board of the Southern Research
Institute’s Environmental Technology Verification initiative.
He has written extensively on the economics of energy efficiency and the
implementation of efficiency programs, and has published numerous articles,
including pieces in the National Tax Journal, Energy Economics, The Journal of
Futures Markets, Derivatives Quarterly, Analyse’ Financier, and Environmental
Quality Management. He has been an
occasional referee for several scholarly journals including the Journal of
Public Economics.
Dr. Walsh has been on the
faculties of the University of Notre Dame and the Stuart School of Business at
the Illinois Institute of Technology, and has lectured at Princeton,
Northwestern, Colorado, Illinois and Johns Hopkins (Bologna).
In addition to Bachelor of Science degrees in Economics and Political Science from Illinois State University, Dr. Walsh holds M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Economics from Michigan State University, and has attended the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business.