Distinguished Visitor Strongin Presents Lecture Series

March 13, 2020

Goldman Sachs partner Steve Strongin enlightened and enlivened Pardee RAND as a Distinguished Visitor-in-Residence from January 27 through March 12. Strongin is head of Goldman's Global Investment Research division, based in New York City. His division provides original, fundamental insights and analysis for clients in the equity, fixed income, currency and commodities markets.

During his residency, he offered a lecture series to Pardee RAND students and faculty, with brown-bag lunches on the following topics:

  • Regulatory failure: Forecasting what will happen rather than rely on hope (January 30)
  • Managing disruption: Policy’s actual never-ending war (February 13)
  • Restriction vs alignment: Harnessing economic innovation to improve regulatory outcomes (February 20)
  • Sanctions regimes and community policing: Making them work for change (February 27)
  • How economic and political outcomes change with changing norms (March 5)

For each talk, he offered readings to prepare attendees for the conversations that followed.

He also offered talks to RAND researchers toward the end of his residency. He discussed "Climate change and carbon prices: What interventions are investors willing to fund?" with researchers in the Community Health and Environmental Policy program of RAND's Social and Economic Well-being division; "Econometrics, modeling and credibility" with RAND's Economics, Sociology, and Statistics Department; and “What can policy researchers learn from analytics in the finance world?” for researchers working with the Center for Scalable Computing and Analysis.

Strongin was also an active participant in Career Services' inaugural Student Research Showcase, providing excellent feedback to the many students who participated.

At Goldman, Strongin is a member of the company's Management Committee and its Firmwide Client and Business Standards Committee, and co-chair of the Firmwide Technology Risk Committee. Previously, he served as global head of strategy research and co-chief operating officer of Global Investment Research, as well as global head of commodities research. He joined Goldman Sachs in 1994 and was named managing director in 1998 and partner in 2002.

Global Investment Research includes the Global Markets Institute, the research think-tank of Goldman Sachs. It is dedicated to producing thought leadership on issues that affect public policy, corporate strategy and society. Its global client base includes policymakers, regulators, business leaders, investors and the public.

Prior to joining Goldman, he spent 12 years at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, most recently as the director of Monetary Policy Research. Before that, he was an economist at the Center for the Study of Economy and State at the University of Chicago and a researcher at PanHeuristics, a think tank focused on military strategy and energy policy.

He has published in numerous academic journals in finance, macroeconomics, risk management, industrial organization and econometrics. He has also published extensively in energy, banking and labor policy.

Strongin is a member of the Board of Directors of Ocean Conservancy. In addition, he is a member of the Advisory Council to the College at the University of Chicago, a member of the Jury of the World Resources Institute’s Ross Prize for Cities, and a member of the Becker Friedman Institute Advisory Council. Previously, he was a member of the Advisory Board of the RAND Center for Corporate Ethics and Governance

He earned undergraduate and graduate degrees in economics from the University of Chicago and a graduate degree in management from Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management.

— Monica Hertzman